It rained a great deal during the night, but the sun has come up this morning in clear skies. It remains to be seen if the rain will hold off during the day.

The rest of the afternoon and evening yesterday was spent relaxing and caring for my various wounds. Almost every task was difficult as I kept coming up against the injured finger on my right hand. It has made me something of an invalid. My entire right hand and right foot have both swollen up, but so far I don’t see any signs of infection in any of the cuts. The ones on my face and toe are covered by new bandages that I put on yesterday from my own stock of high-quality Elasti-Plast bandages. I haven’t removed them this morning, so I don’t know for sure what is happening with those.

I feel some sympathy for my poor damaged body. It has enough to contend with on a daily basis here without having to set about healing all of these injuries. It’s astonishing that it has such recuperative powers. It’s also astonishing that we just take it for granted. We get a cut, and then we sit back and wait for the body to seal the cut and then grow new flesh and skin to cover it all up. Soon it is as good as new, and we haven’t the tiniest clue how the body manages this miracle. The injury to my finger is probably going to be a much larger challenge, involving as it does ligaments and bone and tendons. I have no idea how the body repairs that kind of damage. At this point, I don’t know what the extent of the damage is. The bones don’t seem to be broken, though, so that is good news. I imagine I will be nursing this finger for weeks to come.

I didn’t see much of the firefighters last night. I guess they worked late. I ate dinner with Rene and Grace and Jeffery again. They had a large amount of cooked rice courtesy of the firefighters plus a container of tuna and corned beef. I had been sick to my stomach that night and morning, so I hadn’t planned on eating, but I was quite hungry and joined in the meal with relish. Even so, the others finished eating long before I was even halfway done. As I’ve noticed many times, Filipinos eat at a remarkable speed. I feel quite dainty and overly-refined when I eat next to them. This is doubly so when they eat with their hands – the rice gets shoveled in. In fact, I was still eating when they cleared the “table” and took away the remaining rice. I was still hungry, and it was eventually brought back. Jeffery said the usual custom was not to remove the food if someone was still eating. If they did, it meant that that person would never marry.

Water has suddenly become a bigger problem in that our well has run dry. I’m very confused, in fact, about the water situation. I’ve asked Jefferey about it a number of times, but I get many different conflicting answers. However, it appears that the well is not supplied with groundwater. It is, in fact, a cement cistern attached through a pipe to the city’s main water supply. According to Jeffery, people all over the city have been slicing into the city’s water pipes to siphon off water. The pipes are so damaged now that there is not enough pressure to deliver any water to our well. Jeffery has organized expeditions out into the streets to get water. And yesterday, a group of seven or eight large water bottles appeared. These, Jeffery, said were filled with potable water. This was as opposed to most of the water that comes from pumps. That water can only be used for bathing and for the CR. Jeffery had someone carry one of these large bottles up to my room and presented it to me as a supply of drinking water.

I’m not entirely sure about the quality of this water. Common sense dictates that even the city’s water supply would be contaminated. I actually didn’t even know that potable water was being delivered through the city’s pipes before the typhoon. In any event, I decided to take a chance. I used my Katadyn water filter to filter a couple of gallons of this water, and I intend to use it for coffee and for cooking. Then at least the water will be both filtered and boiled. I still have a few liters of pure mineral water in sealed bottles. I’m trying to reserve that for when I finally hit the road on my bicycle.

A confusing moment came this morning when Jeffery asked me if I needed water for the CR. He then pointed to my water bottle of drinking water, and said that I could use it for the CR and he would get more. This seemed wrong, because isn’t there a clear distinction between the potable water and the non-potable? Wouldn’t the potable water be quite valuable? Why would he encourage me to just dump it down the toilet? As I said, I’m often confused about things here. I ask question after question and I get so many different answers at different times that I eventually just give up trying to understand. I assume there is logic at the base of things that go on around me, but I never seem able to reach it.

A good example of this was a moment yesterday when a woman now staying at the pension swept up two piles of leaves and garbage and set fire to them. I was more than a little annoyed and astonished at this. Vast clouds of smoke rose up from these two fires and filled the entire courtyard and all the rooms. I was coughing and hacking and my eyes were burning. The smoke was so intense that it was now impossible to sit outside on the verandah as we had become accustomed to do.

The fires made no sense to me because the courtyard is filled with garbage and debris to a depth of two feet in places. There are mountains of stuff. Right after the typhoon, when things seemed more hopeful, hotel staff spent hours filling garbage cans with mud and junk and carting it outside and dumping it in the streets. That made the most sense since the streets were buried under huge piles of garbage and eventually the city will have to remove it all with heavy equipment and trucks. Therefore, it was ridiculous to sweep up some stuff and then set fire to it. Sweep it up if you must, but then just dump it outside with the rest of the garbage. Why start a toxic fire – one that you are even exposing your children to? And this was the kind of fire that doesn’t flare up and burn and disappear. No, it just sits there and smoulders for hours and sometimes even days.

I came across Jeffery on the balcony and, trying to keep things in the spirit of cultural discovery, I asked him to explain to me this passion for sweeping up debris and setting fire to it. Especially why do it now? Why not just dump the debris outside to join the hundreds of tons of other debris already out there? Jeffery, unfortunately, did not take my question in the spirit with which I tried to convey it. He took it as meaning that I was complaining about the smoke (which I suppose I really was) and shortly afterwards, the fires were extinguished. This morning, the same woman is out there sweeping up, but she is now putting the debris in large sacks to be carried off somewhere. I’m glad the smoke is no longer an issue. More than that, though, I wanted to uncover the logic behind setting the fires to begin with. It appeared so wrong to me that I assumed there were reasons behind it that I just wasn’t aware of. If there are such reasons, no one has been able to explain them to me. I can only assume that it is one of those strange habits passed down from generation to generation and not questioned. Her mother did this when she was a child, and now she does it. Also, it’s pretty apparent that the smoke simply doesn’t bother the Filipinos as much as it does me. Having grown up here, they are more accustomed to the garbage fires and other things like the honking of horns. (Edit: I was told much later that people set these fires in order to smoke out and even kill mosquitoes. I have no idea if this actually works, but it was a relief to finally get an answer to my question and uncover the logic behind setting these garbage fires. I have no idea why Jeffery didn’t tell me this when I asked him.)

The Filipinos also seem to have an enormous capacity for enduring a world of uncertainty. Witness Jeffery and Rene going to the airport early in the morning to attempt to get on a flight. They had no confirmed seats, no information that they could get on any plane, nothing. But they went and stood in line in the pouring rain all day long. And even when they set out, they had had no idea how they would even get to the airport. They did find a tricycle with a total of eight people on it, and it got a flat tire and they had to wait forever for it to be repaired. Then they had to make the long return journey to the pension house. They ate nothing the entire day and didn’t get back here until around 8 at night. I would never do anything like that. I want to know in advance what my likelihood of success is before I would subject myself to a miserable day like that. I want information and schedules and plans and facts.

Yesterday, one of the firefighters suddenly became concerned about a missing relative in the town of Baybay. He decided to go there and investigate. He set off to the “terminal.” I saw him later that night and I learned that he had gone to three different van terminals and had waited for hours at each one in a sea of uncertainty and never did manage to get on a van going anywhere. And he seemed quite cheerful and relaxed. I would have been a wreck. This, of course, is why I tend to ride a bicycle. Then I can be sure of my situation. I am in control of what happens. This fellow, unsuccessful yesterday, is simply going to try again today.

And I find that people’s plans are oddly undefined. They appear to get it into their heads to leave Tacloban and go somewhere else, but there never seems to be an exact reason why. They often have no definite plan of even where they will be staying or what they will do when they get there. But they set off anyway. There is a faith that things will work out. I don’t share that faith in the slightest.

This idea ties in somewhat with my thoughts about the heroes and the hoarders in survival situations. I tend toward the hoarder side of things, but it isn’t because I am a bad and selfish person. It is because I can’t stand the confusion and chaos that comes with large groups of people. I also hate having to depend on other people. They almost always let you down. The only way to be sure of something is to do it yourself. Therefore, when I saw how many people were doing laundry before and taking hundreds of buckets of water out of the well, I became concerned that water would run out. I set about gathering as many spare and unused buckets as I could. I put them all in the bathroom and started filling them with water. I was stockpiling as much water as possible so that I would at least be able to flush the toilet when the well ran dry. And now the well has run dry.

There was a time when there was some gasoline available here. It had been drained from gas tanks. I wanted to be sure that some would be available for my stove and cooking. Unfortunately, it wasn’t my gas, and I couldn’t just help myself and take it. So I spoke to Jeffery and Rene and asked them if they could be sure to save at least a liter of this gas so that we could continue to cook. I reminded them several times, and they assured me not to worry. They would keep one liter of gas so we could continue to cook. But later on, I learned that all the gas had gone into the tank of various scooters and none had been saved. It’s always that way when you depend on other people.

 

 

Tags: CR, fire, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, Super Typhoon Yolanda, Tacloban, typhoon