Friday, November 8, 2013 – continued:

After clearing out the bedroom somewhat, we waited for the storm to die down sufficiently that we could leave our apartment to see if we could help some of our neighbors.

Once we figured that the wind was low enough that we would no longer have to worry about flying debris, we grabbed a chipping hammer that I had bought the week before, as well as a large 12″ cooking knife, and left the apartment out the back. We had to leave out of the back because the front gate of our apartment was blocked by debris. That the wall of the back yard had fallen down turned out to be convenient in this respect because it allowed us to easily leave the yard. Outside, the water still came up past mid-calf, and was even deeper in some places.

Our first neighbor had a house that had cement block walls, but had lost a large section of its roof, the same as ours. Many of our other neighbors had taken refuge in this house because it was one of the larger in the area. By the time we got there, many of the people who had left their homes to take refuge there had already left to return to what was left of their homes.

We helped this neighbor to turn over a section of a concrete wall so that he could get a large piece of corrugated steel that it had fallen on top of. It took all three of us (the neighbor, Elder Oakes, and myself) to lift it off, and then he threw the large piece of steel onto a pile of other collected pieces which he would later use to repair his roof.

He told us that he needed no more help, and that we could see if anyone else needed assistance. He told us to be careful of nails, showing us a wound in his foot. Most of the rubble consisted of the framework used to support the roofing of many of the smaller homes that had been entirely destroyed. The wooden beams that came from that type of framework were full of nails, and many of them were submerged and impossible to see. We were sure to walk very carefully and only in areas that people had already been walking to be sure that we wouldn’t accidentally step on an upturned nail.

When we reached our next neighbors, we saw that their house had sustained much more damage than the others in the area. This was especially surprising because the main section of their home had walls that were made of cement. During the storm, they had first lost the roof of their home, and then one-by-one, the walls of their home fell outwards into the water, leaving the concrete foundation bare. The reason why their walls had not been able to withstand the winds was because they were not connected to the foundation very well. A cement foundation had been built, but the walls were not built at the same time, and there was no steel rebar reinforcing the joint between the foundation and the walls. Rather, the walls were mainly supported by timbers that had been driven deep into the ground on the perimeter of the foundation. The main supporting columns of the walls were built upon these timbers. During the storm however, the aging lumber had not been strong enough to withstand the wind, and each of the timbers had snapped at the base.

We helped the men of that family to clear the rubble that remained of their home, stacking what was left of the wooden framework in one place, and the remaining corrugated steel in another. Piece-by-piece, we used our hammer to help them to separate the framework into individual beams, and to separate the beams from the corrugated steel, so that they could be organized. They were going to be using these materials to construct a temporary shelter in place of the home they had once had.

While we were helping them, we saw a group of older women come into the neighborhood to return to the remains of their house. The house they had lived in had lost a majority of its roof, and had been mostly gutted by the wind of everything that had been inside while they had been gone. The three women wept as they entered into the ruins of the house that they had been living in for so long.

During this time, we happened to be visited by our Zone Leaders. During the storm, their apartment had taken some damage, and part of the roof was gone over one of the bedrooms. In Tolosa, they were high up enough that there was no flooding from the storm surge at their apartment. The storm had left them without contact with the rest of the mission, both power and cell signal had been lost. Expecting that the cell towers would come back on via generator as usual later in the day, they remembered that my area used a different network than theirs, and that if the signal did come back, it would be expensive to call. We were also the closest area to theirs, so they decided that they could come and check on us. When they arrived, we told them that we were fine and that we had enough food for ourselves for two more days. They informed us that the destruction was the same over the 5 kilometers between our areas, but that there had not been flooding in Tolosa. They also told us that the Tolosa Chapel had also taken minor damage to its roof, but was otherwise okay.

We also encountered a centipede while we were helping to clear the rubble of this neighbor’s home. He saw it first, and then commenced to turn it to paste by repeatedly smashing it with a small coconut that had been the closest thing that he could have grabbed at the time. Part of Filipino culture is the responsibility to kill any harmful animal whenever encountered (snakes, centipedes, etc.), and this responsibility remains in full effect after the storm.

Once most of this house was cleared, we continued on to another neighbor to help them to clean up there. This neighbor had a nice home that had been left relatively in-tact by the storm, but some of their peripheral structures had been obliterated by the storm. We helped them clean up for a while, and then decided that there was not much left that we could do in the area, so we returned to our home (probably around 2:00pm).