Friday, November 8, 2013 – continued:

When we finished helping our neighbors, we left our hammer with them and returned to the apartment.

We decided that the first thing that we needed to do was clear out and sweep out the bedroom. In retrospect, I’m not entirely certain what the main motivation was behind that effort. I think it was the same reason that our neighbors outside were trying to clear off the foundation of their home. The storm had only brought chaos, disorder, uncertainty, and destruction, and everyone’s deepest drive at this point would be to undo everything that the storm had done in any and every way possible. I remember wanting to clear out the room so that there would be a place where we could start in our efforts to restore safety and order in our lives.

Our bedroom was now going to be our entire home, so we cleared out everything that had been damaged by water, organized the things that we wanted to keep so they could all stay off of the floor, swept out as much of the mud and water that was covering the floor as we could, and preparing to spend at least one more night in this apartment.

Recovering the apartment, we found that we had the following resources:

• Our water pump, though surrounded by rubble, was still functioning and pumping out clear water.
• Our refrigerator had fallen over and filled with water and been buried in rubble. We opened it up and we had a sealed bag of 15 hot dogs, 3L of ice cream, an unopened loaf of bread that was amazingly dry inside, an unopened pouch of mayo, six eggs, and a jar of strawberry preserves.
• Our food stores were still on the table. We had 5 gallons of filtered drinking water, 4-5 cans of pork and beans, a couple pouches of pork and beans, three pouches of pancake mix, and a can of spam.
• Our soap was still okay in the bathroom.
• Our stove and propane tank were both upside down and half buried in rubble, but still connected to each other. The metal pieces that go over each burner so that you can set the pan on top somehow ended up underneath the table on the other side of the room.
• My mosquito inhibitor was able to work when it was dried out and new batteries were installed along with a new pack of repellent that had remained sealed during the storm. We didn’t see any mosquitoes after the storm.

By the end of the day, we had swept out the bedroom quite well and organized our remaining possessions, keeping them off of the floor (most of our things were on our beds). We set up the stove in the bedroom, and we had boiled hot dogs with mayo on them for dinner. For dessert, we took the 3.0L tub of ice cream before it was completely melted, drew a line down the middle, and ate about half before we had to throw away the rest.

We kept a candle in the window and a few more candles on the floor. A kerosene torch was left going in the living room, and we lit our second-to-last glowstick.

At this point, we had a chance to contemplate what our course of action would be in terms of survival and figuring out what was going on over the next few days. Elder Oakes suggested that we should probably try going to the hills and surviving on coconuts, but we decided that it probably wasn’t the best idea. I was most in favor of waiting at the apartment for help to arrive from mission headquarters. I imagined that it wouldn’t be long until the Assistants to the President would pull up in their Ford Ranger, we would throw in our bags, and drive up to the mission home with all of our possessions. At the time, we had imagined that because we had seen the eye of the storm, that there couldn’t have been anywhere affected as much as San Roque. We had no idea that the flooding had been so bad in Tacloban City that none of the mission vehicles were left operational. It turns out that they would actually have been able to get us all out had we waited until Monday night, because they were actually able to evacuate some of the missionaries further south in Dulag on Monday. What we decided on doing, however, was that we would wait until after lunch the next day, and then we would head to Tolosa, where the Zone Leaders would be. We would have to leave a lot of our stuff since we would have to walk, but we figured that if help and information was going to get to anyone first, it would probably get to the Zone Leaders in Tolosa.

Elder Oakes slept on the top bunk with his bags stacked in the only dry corner. I slept on my usual bottom bunk with all three of my bags at my feet. I slept on top of a sheet that I had kept dry inside one of the bags, which was nice since the leather mattress was slightly damp. It was very hard to fall asleep that night because there was no electricity. I was very tired. As I lay there fanning myself with a black, circular folding hand fan that Americans usually use as a giveaway frisbee, I remember wondering if I would be able to continue fanning myself after I fell asleep and then coming to the realization that it would be impossible. I finally got to sleep around 1:00am. We slept until around 8:00am.