Day 2: Home
It was already 3:00 AM when a kid cried looking for his mom only to find out that his mom was looking for their missing roof that was flown away by the strong blows by typhoon Odette. My aunt who was sleeping during that time was woken up by that piteous child’s weep. The cry gets louder and almost all of the people inside the evacuation hall was up. I also heard a news that one of my neighbors got some pretty big wounds due to the glass that collapsed and the flown pieces hit her including her arms. Her husband and children were also slightly hurt as well. Thankfully she was being rushed to the hospital safe.
There are still sudden breezes even though we knew that Typhoon Odette have already left the area but we still decided to go back home because the elders are so tired and cannot get a goodnight sleep after experiencing that horrible storm and as we got out of the hall we witnessed the devastating footsteps of the typhoon.
We are already in our neighborhood and everyone are starting to prepare for their sleep. All of us decided to just stay in my cousin Leslie’s place since most of our houses were greatly tormented by the typhoon. I suddenly went looking for my cats and only three out of eight showed up but as soon as the sun starts to rise hours later thank God they slowly appeared and thank God all of my cats are complete and alive with no wounds. I went to look what happened to our house and it was extremely agonizing to witness what happened to it. It was my family’s home for 25 years and it was greatly wrecked most of our clothes, books, bags, school outputs, photo albums, and other things that were being left inside were all wet and muddy.
9 in the morning when I took a bath and most of my clothes are wet the only thing that was dry was my fancy pink dress and I look like as if I was not a typhoon victim. A neighbor called us saying that there is a packed lunch giveaway at the barangay for everyone. I felt so shy asking for packed lunch because I look like I’m about to go partying but I still went there even though my cousins are laughing at me cause I was just so hungry.
During the afternoon, my cousin asked me to go with her at the mall to withdraw some money. There is no single vehicle that would take us, everything is fully occupied. We walked towards the mall and when we arrived there is a very long queue at the grocery stores and their ATM machine was not available so we just went home and it took us for about 30 minutes to grab a vacant taxi. That was the time that I realized that couple of weeks from that typhoon everything is going to be miserable.
It is currently 10 days after the typhoon happened and still there is no electricity and limited phone signal, we would just ask someone who goes to work to charge our gadgets. Every night when we fall asleep we would just fan ourselves until we catch some sleeps and every morning we would see some mosquito bites on our skin. We also don’t have water source from time to time, so we would just go to our neighbor’s house and pay them money just for us to get water for bathing. Drinking water from grocery stores are all out of stocks and refilling stations are also not operating since they are also affected by the typhoon.
This situation that we have until now is hard for everyone. We are still now on the process of redeeming ourselves. Rebuilding our homes, looking for the lost stuff, electricity lines are slowly coming back to some areas (but not entirely), each barangays are starting to clean up, and small establishments are slowly starting to operate. People are still fighting and are trying to face north amidst the nightmare that we all have been through. One thing is for sure, we all learned something from this calamity and we are going to stand up after that deep fall.
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