Sunday December 22, 2013
6:55 a.m. Tacloban, Philippines
Day 45, Typhoon Yolanda

Not proofed
I was chatting with Rene yesterday, and I got another element to the houseboy’s story. Rene said that the houseboy had gone back to his room to get some of his belongings. And that was when he was trapped there. This never came up in all the times I questioned this fellow about his story, so I went back to him. He confirmed that he had gone back to his room to get “my luggage”. This actually makes his story much more dramatic. If the cement wall had already crashed down, then there is no way he would have gone back to his room. It would have been far too late and it would have been nearly impossible to get back to his room let alone inside it. Therefore, he must have gone into his room and while he was inside, the cement wall had fallen over and nearly trapped him inside. Unfortunately, no matter how many times I asked him about this, I couldn’t get an answer that made any sense. I simply couldn’t get him to focus on the sequence of events. This was particularly frustrating because it pertains to whether the storm surge had toppled over the cement wall or it had simply fallen over at some point during the ongoing flooding. I guess I’ll never know.
Very little else happened yesterday. I was still feeling some of the effects of my illness, and I was not that energetic. There was also a tremendous amount of rain, and there was not much chance of going anywhere.
In the morning, the rain hadn’t begun yet, and I went down to Hayward. Manny was there and I had a cup of coffee and chatted with him. It wasn’t our best chat for the simple reason that I felt less inclined to simply stay quiet and tacitly agree with him about everything. The truth is that I disagree with him about everything he says. If I don’t disagree outright, I generally dislike what he says. He’s a typical tyrannical business-owner with a quick temper and micro-management tendencies. He’s also older and has the attitude that everything in the world is wrong and he is right about everything. I generally ignore all of this. I’m not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing. I guess I feel that I have no choice. If I reacted honestly to everyone and everything, life would be very difficult indeed. I find most people disagreeable and ill-informed and unpleasant and poorly behaved in one fashion or another. If I reacted honestly to that, I would spend my life arguing with everyone. Occasionally, though I’ll get fed up with listening to the nonsense that pours out of someone’s mouth, and I can’t stop myself from piping up with a meek little counter argument or opposite point of view.
In this case, I’m not sure what set me off. I think it was when Manny parroted the usual nonsense about how people in the West don’t care about their parents and grandparents and ship them off to horrible old age homes to die alone and uncared for. It’s astonishing how prevalent this attitude is. I hear it all the time and it is generally told to me in a self-congratulatory way as the local people pride themselves on their strong family values. I almost always justlet it go. What is the point of arguing? But I piped up a little bit and told Manny that this was a complete myth and extremely distorted. I think I said this because it came up in one of the podcasts I had listened to. This was the story of immigrants to the U.K. and this person had personal experience of an old age home there and realized the truth of the situation.
Manny was also talking about the typhoon and the storm surge. He has all kinds of ill-informed opinions about the typhoon. He believes, for example, that there was no wave at all. He went on and on about all these strange reasons why there was no wave. This has come up before, and I usually let him say whatever he likes. There is no point arguing with him. It’s strange, though, because he never leaves his store. He has never seen any of the damage done by the typhoon. Yet, he is firmly convinced that he knows everything and everyone else is wrong. I didn’t make a big deal out of it, but I pointed out to him that I had spoken to many people about their experiences, and the most consistent story is about a series of three waves.
In a strange way, Manny has a point. He pointed out that on the west coast of the United States he saw lots of waves over ten feet high. People surf on them. So a ten-foot-high wave does not automatically devastate a shoreline. He’s right about that, but of course the wave that hit Tacloban was not a typical wave. I wonder if technically it could be called a wave at all. It might look like a wave when it comes toward the shore, but it is really just the front end of a large flood of water – the storm surge – a huge amount of water that sloshes over the land. But Manny is not the type of person with which you can have a discussion. He doesn’t listen and he simply goes on with his own point of view whether it makes any sense or not.
When it came to the damage caused by the storm surge, he blamed it on the eye of the typhoon. He likened the eye to a tornado and he said that it moved around Tacloban and caused the damage here and there. He drew a diagram on a piece of paper to illustrate this.
Of course, this view is completely wrong. For one thing, the eye of a typhoon is huge. It isn’t a narrow point like a tornado. I don’t know how large the eye of Yolanda was, but it was certainly much larger than all of Tacloban city, and I believe it made landfall south of Tacloban. In any event, the eye of a typhoon is actually quite calm. There are no powerful winds in the eye at all. That’s the whole point of the eye. The powerful winds begin at the wall of the eye and extend outward. The eye is quiet and calm. So Manny’s belief about this is completely wrong. But there is no point arguing. I tossed out my facts and left it at that. Yet, there is something about even doing that that depresses me. I usually ignore all these sides to a person like Manny. I enjoy his company by ignoring all the negative things in his personality. By disagreeing with him even slightly, I’m forced to acknowledge that he’s not a very likeable person. I’d rather ignore that. It often seems to me that whether a person is likeable or not, kind or not, intelligent or not, doesn’t make any difference. Most people are not likeable and are not kind and are not intelligent, so if you restrict yourself, you would end up unable to spend time with anyone.

Tags: Philippines Bike Trip 2013, So Manny, Super Typhoon Yolanda, Tacloban, typhoon