Sunday Night, November 10, 2013:
A lot of us hadn’t been too concerned up until that point, but the popping sound of not-too-distant semi-automatic small arms fire was incredibly persuasive. I remember contemplating the damage a stray bullet might do and concluding that it was not a risk I was enthusiastic about taking. Judging from the direction the discussion was taking, it seemed that I wasn’t the only one thinking the same thing. A few strong personalities and loud voices however, contended. They rationalized that the gunfire was “a couple of warning shots,” and cited the importance of “exact obedience” to the Mission Presidents assigned sleeping arrangements (albeit arrangements that were not made with gunfire as part of the equation).
After these few effectively prevailed, we headed out as a group to the nearby apartment. As we left the church parking lot and headed down the street, some of us already forgetting the gravity of the situation needed to be reminded to walk quickly and quietly, side conversations could wait until a time when there wasn’t any risk of unwanted attention.
Arriving at the apartment, we went up to the second floor. Some of the missionaries more familiar with the apartment had expressed some concern about the locks having been broken when the doors had been blown open in the typhoon, but I found that the bolt was still intact, so I locked it behind us as we went inside.
The ground floor was still covered in muddy water, but upstairs, the floor was just wet and dirty. Unfortunately, there were only a couple dry mattresses, not enough to accommodate more than ten of us. I got as comfortable as possible in a chair next to the window overlooking the driveway leading to the apartment as well a small window that was over the stairway. I took some of the glass panels out of the window over the stairway and got a large cement block that I figured I would be able to utilize as a deterrent if any looters decided to stop by.
We were all quite concerned about our safety at the apartment. As we were approaching 72 hours since the storm hit, and the available supply of food and water in the city was being depleted, the city was slowly descending into anarchy and chaos. Earlier in the day, some of the group had witnessed the desperation first hand while distributing food at the City Hall. The apartment was fairly secluded, most likely out of the way of anyone looking for food, but we were still cautious. We kept our flashlights off or dimmed so that we wouldn’t attract any unwanted attention.
A few minutes after we had gotten settled, we heard someone knocking at the door. The knocking quickly turned to pounding, causing even greater alarm as we rushed to the window to see who was at the door, but we couldn’t see who it was. I flashed my light downward to try to see who it was, or at least get their attention, suspecting that it might be another missionary.
It actually turned out to be a couple of missionaries from our group, the same ones who had been instrumental in convincing us to come to the apartment. They had stayed outside and gone somewhere when we first arrived at the apartment. They had told someone else, but again, it had not been effectively communicated. In their impatience to get in, they ended up kicking the door open. Now the lock was actually broken, everyone was startled, and somewhat perplexed as to why the forced entry was necessary.
We still had a long night ahead of us. Some of us decided that we were not going to be sleeping at all during the night. Mostly because there was nothing comfortable to lie down on (half of us were just sitting on hard bamboo bed frames), but also because we didn’t want to be caught off guard while we slept if someone happened to come by looking for food in the night time. We stayed up for quite a while just talking quietly, but on more than one occasion, we would hear something outside. We would all stop talking at once, listening in sobering silence—for as much as on one occasion—before we would begin talking again in whispered tones.
The nervous tension was universal. After a few hours, we were joined by all of the missionaries that had split up earlier to sleep in a separate room elsewhere on the second floor. They had been hearing people talking outside, but they couldn’t identify anyone, so they decided to join us for the sake of safety in numbers.
Getting somewhat bored, we began going through the food that was left in the apartment, and divided up some candy that had been kept in the room. We also found a can of imported Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, and since no one wanted to eat it cold—except me—they tossed it to me and I was able to have a nice midnight snack.
After battling with some extremely loud sleepers in the group, almost everyone fell asleep. I had given up my chair since I had noticed that someone was trying to sleep by sitting on a single bamboo beam at the end of the bed frame, and was experimenting with different arrangements for myself. I found the beam to be much too precarious a position to try to fall asleep in, so I tried sitting on a desk. On the desk, I decided that what I needed was something to lean against, so I took a concrete tile that had fallen from a hole in the ceiling and set in on the ground, providing myself with a dry place to sit on the floor and lean against the bed frame. After a few minutes, the concrete tile not in agreement with my tailbone, I took a rain poncho that I had kept in my pocket, wadded it up and tried sitting on that. It helped, but I found that I just didn’t have enough space on the tile to actually sit comfortably. Looking around for other options, I saw a couple square feet of unoccupied space in the corner of one of the two mattresses in the room (laid side-by-side, there were already four or five people on them). I walked over to the open spot and crumpled up in a ball and tried to sleep. After a few hours of re-positioning, I was able to finally lie flat at the very edge of the two mattresses, and I got about an hour of sleep before the sun started to rise.
Sunrise from the Apartment