By Craig Bosman
I know it’s going to flood.
After over 24 hours of heavy rains, the normally clear, calm river by my house is brown and swollen. It hadn’t yet crested over its banks, but I know the moment will come. I know this because I am craning my neck out of a jeepney as I ride to the airport to buy some plane tickets, a task I have been delaying for almost three hours as I bounce between my computer screen and the nearby bridge to check on the ever-rising river. I figure it might flood a bit while I am gone, but I’ll need to wait for the water to recede anyway before I can do anything, so I might as well get this taken care of.
I had been awoken that Saturday morning at about 10:30 a.m.
as my host mother yelled at my host brother. They’re usually overly quiet when
I do one of my weekend snooze-ins, so I was startled and woke up immediately.
The river wasn’t cresting at that very moment, as my host mom had been led to
believe, but I sprang into action quickly enough. Having had three knee-high
floods in my low-elevated room in the last two months, I put everything up
high. All clothes were placed above three feet. All books, magazines, and
papers elevated above four feet. All cords and some electronics coiled on my
tallest shelf, above six feet. My laptop, newly purchased external hard drive,
and computer accessories were stashed safely in the elevated, main part of the house,
which had never come close to flooding. I kept my wallet, passport, and cell
phone safely with me as I left the cozy house that had provided me with a
family and a true sense of home in this sometimes strange land, the one place
that I had lived the longest since leaving my parents’ house for college.
As I get out of the jeepney at the airport, I am forced to pay
on the driver’s side of the busy highway, as a huge puddle of water has formed
on the other side. Despite my umbrella, I get soaked on the short walk to the
ticket office. I purchase my plane tickets and walk back out to the highway.
(Up to this point, the tickets are a big enough savings that my airport trip is
still mentally justified.) It is raining so hard that the normally dogged salesman
tactics of the airport tricycle drivers lay dormant. I consider one last time extending
my trip into the city to purchase cereal and a new mirror to replace my
recently broken one, but decide I should definitely get home. I find myself
standing on the side of the road for quite some time in an unbelievably heavy
downpour until finally a bus comes along.
About halfway into the trip home, we come to a bridge. A river that I’ve scarcely noticed before is raging brown and frothy, and has completely broken free of its banks. Surely a house or two has been swept away. Water pours over the highway. From my cramped, wet standing position I manage to pull out my cell phone and try to call my house, but the line has been disconnected. At this point, I realize that this rainstorm is less a curiosity than a disaster in the making.
Through giant puddles, washouts, and broken down vehicles, we make our way to my town, picking up a few soaked and stranded passengers along the way. I get off the bus at the aforementioned bridge near my house and am shocked to see that the water is coming over the highway. The river has broken free of its banks far upstream and a raging torrent of water is bullying its way through much of the town. I knew it would flood, but I expected the water to come around from the back, across the nipa floodplain and up into my room, which sits a few feet lower than the main house. Without really stopping to think, I start walking forward through the water. The young men of the neighborhood are helping vehicles pass through. My five-year-old next-door neighbor waves and smiles at me from his living room window as water gushes all around and in his house. That he is likely in some sort of danger registers in my mind, but I can’t imagine that his parents would leave him there in an unsafe situation. Spotting my host mother up ahead, I wade as briskly as I can up to the group of people standing at the edge of the water. She’s established a refuge at a relative’s house just above the flood line. I ask if everybody is ok. Having ensured this, I immediately ask if my laptop is ok. Luckily for me, she had grabbed my bag on her way out of the house. I breathe a momentary sigh of relief and stand dazed, watching the scene while resisting efforts at being shepherded into the refuge house.
After letting this all sink in for a few minutes, I realize I hardly looked at our house and decide to go back to see how bad it is. Brushing off admonishment and warnings from those gathered around me, I trudge back through the water to see that the water hasn’t yet reached the doorknob on my room. For now, my camera is safe, and I cling to this hope over the next few hours. But the current is much too strong to attempt to go down and rescue anything. With local emergency services having under control what little humans can control at this point, there is simply nothing to do but wait.
And watch. Brown water slowly rises as it continues to gush across the two-lane built up highway that typically serves as a levy of sorts. I mark the water’s steady rise by noting where it crosses the road’s yellow center line in relation to the nearest house. Vegetable stands come loose, their nipa shingles and bamboo walls hurtling across the road. Vehicles can no longer pass. Concrete fences break free, sending torrents of water screaming through. A rare cared-for pet dog (as opposed to the more typical mangy street dog) is carried out well beyond the flooded area. Stubborn holdouts emerge from their houses carrying a few provisions. A barangay counselor, a community pillar and emergency rescue volunteer, pulls his head back in despair and tears as he sees the structure of his house crumbling, in between his own valiant rescue efforts for others. I lend an umbrella as a computer case is carried out of a house that contains few other valuables. Women wearing thin shirts cry in the rain while trying to maintain their modesty and dignity, watching the water pour over everything they own. I hug my shivering, shirtless, and skinny neighbor to try to keep him warm.
The water breaks down part of the bamboo gate outside our refuge house and I begin to worry that it too, will flood. The pounding rain is incessant, and I am at a loss as to how there could possibly be any more water in the sky. As the water keeps rising and the rain keeps pounding, I look to the sky, on the verge of tears, and mentally shout a desperate prayer. Please, God, for the love of Yourself, make it stop. I grab my dry valuables, the ones I had on me and the contents of my laptop bag, and haul them to my office, which is the only safe place I have access to that I am reasonably sure will not flood, although I am beginning to wonder.
Less than three hours after I arrived back in my town, darkness falls and the water level finally begins to recede. The town is plunged into darkness, as the electricity supply has been shut off or damaged (I’m never really sure which). I run into one of my tennis buddies, who takes me to his house and offers me a change of clothes and some hot water to drink (even at this moment I can’t bring myself to drink coffee). I change into the white soccer shorts that I will wear for the majority of the next three days. We return to the flood scene and eventually I eat a quiet, candlelit dinner with my extended host family.
By this point, the water is off the road and I decide to make the trek over to the house to survey the damage. The three-foot wide walkway on the side of the road has been completely washed out in one long section. Armed with only the tiny LED flashlight on my cell phone, it’s hard to see, but I am devastated by what I can make out. The front door to the main house has broken and there is a water line about four feet high ringing the room. All the furniture has fallen down or been violently tossed about. The television, that daily respite of peace and entertainment for the tired and weary, lies face down in the inches-deep mud that covers the entire floor. I don’t even bother to check my room except to notice that my door has also broken off, as have half of my windows. With a heavy heart, I trudge back to the refuge house and enter quietly.
“How is it?” asks my host mother. I walk over and slowly sit down, trying to find my voice. I’ve never had to inform somebody that their family member has died, but I imagine it is something like this. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “It’s really, really bad.” I describe the things I’ve seen and sit sadly as everything registers with the people around me. My 14-year-old host brother decides we should go back, so I reluctantly accompany him and go further into the mess than before. I’m astonished at how high the water got in my room. Everything I own is wet and most of it is also muddy, if it’s still there at all. If the water level had only been three inches lower my camera would have made it, but it too has fallen victim to the flood. I take it back with me anyway. I hear cats mewing desperately, and am pleased some of them have survived – I’d given them up for dead hours ago.
When we get back to the house, the extended refugee family of three siblings, one sister-in-law, and three teenagers is lying down on the floor and various pieces of furniture. Typically, they’ve reserved the couch for me. I tell them I can just grab a couple cushions and sleep on the floor, but they insist. Ripped away from my world of a comfortable bed, an electric fan, and a mosquito net for brownouts (otherwise I use the fan to blow them away), I have an awful night’s sleep. The couch is about a foot too short for my legs. It’s too hot to use a sheet, but there are too many mosquitoes to not pull it over me. They constantly buzz near my ears anyway. I’m no longer used to the sounds of roosters or barking dogs. The dreams I have are punctuated by worrying about if any of my neighbors died, and less importantly but still mindfully, if my favorite cat survived.
I’m awoken by the sound of the others leaving the house. I
mumble that I’ll accompany them, but quickly fall back asleep, feeling tired
and also not wanting to be there when they see the house for the first time. I
eat a small breakfast with the cousins my host mother grew up with and make my
first daylight trip through the disaster area. Trees are flattened, fences and
buildings are scattered, and there is mud everywhere. The house next door,
owned by my host mother’s brother (there are five siblings living in a row) has
lost two of its four walls. Arriving at my house, I do the first logical thing
I can think of: bailing out my room. There’s still standing water because it’s
built like a large, angular concrete bathtub. This is helpful during high tides
or most heavy rains, but it greatly increases the work in the event of an
actual flood.
Shortly after, my work counterpart and his wife come over with their two young sons to survey the damage. They take the boys home and return to work clearing out my room for the rest of the day. Among the parade of spectators, gawkers, and passersby that will file by over the next few days, they are the only non-family members who will put in their sweat and get their hands dirty to help clean, although some will offer clothes and food.
After a night wondering what got swept out the open door and
what stayed in my room, I am abnormally overjoyed to see that my backpacks,
tennis racket, and soccer shoes are still there. My books are in bad shape, all
of my papers and magazines are gone, and most of my various small objects seem
to be too. I can’t find my backup eyeglasses or my personal passport (in
contrast to my more important Peace Corps-issued one). Most of my clothes are
still in the room, although the shelf I’d kept them on is torn open and some of
them are spread out across what used to be a rock garden and into the nipa area like muddy cloth shrapnel.
My Peace Corps friend who’s recently moved to the provincial capital, about 22 kilometers away, brings up some clothes for me to borrow and some new boxers for me to wear. I eat lunch shirtless, tired, and dirty in the shell of a house next door as passersby stare. Happy and thankful that I can leave my room to my counterpart and his wife, I spend the afternoon on mud management upstairs and outside. In the late afternoon, I come out of the mostly even-tempered, sober state of mind that I’ve carried thus far and start to feel despair. There’s still tons of mud upstairs, mud everywhere outside, and still standing water in the kitchen. With a lack of sleep, I’m physically and mentally exhausted. We have dinner at the refuge house again and I am finally able to take a bucket shower. After all that rain, I’ve managed to get sunburned in the blessed heat that followed. Aided by an electric fan (the power has come back on, but we won’t turn it on in our house for days to come), I get a much better sleep on the too-short couch where I will remain for the duration of this ordeal.
After eating what will become my standard meal in the coming
days, a peanut butter sandwich, for breakfast, I spend the morning spreading
out mud outside that was removed from the house the previous day. We clear the
pathway from the stairs of the main house to the lower area that includes my
room and the kitchen, and dig a canal for water drainage leading away from this
path. What was once a pleasantly landscaped rock garden is now a mud pit slowly
being filled up with garbage. After countless hours spent worrying about proper
solid waste management in my town, the garbage from even the most conscientious
citizens has been washed away and spread all over the marine ecosystem, and
there is little hope of getting it cleaned up.
We unclog the drain in the bathroom and are finally able to get some mud out of the highest part of the house. Due to a limited number of helping hands and some subtleties of architecture, it is much harder to remove mud from our house than it is from others. We have lunch next door at another brother’s house, where they managed to get all the mud removed on the first day. I jealously eye their piles of fresh laundry as I begin to worry about the festering, muddy pile of my clothes sitting outside. I quietly eat the nourishing, appreciated, yet not-quite-delicious food while trying to conceal my utter annoyance at being subjected to yet another around of inane assumptions about America from the hand that feeds me. (Everybody in America is rich, right? There’s no flooding in America, right? You eat bananas?!)
We use relatively primitive tools for our work. Bailing
water is done with buckets, small containers, and inefficient warped dustpans,
not powerful vacuums. Mud is pushed and swept out with short native brooms or
pieces of plywood attached to a bamboo pole, not large push brooms or snow
shovels. Floors are cleaned with rags or sponges, not mops. Handles are short
and everything is back-breaking.
By the end of the day I have emailed my parents about the situation and feel much better, having made some visible progress clearing out mud during the day. However, my toes are killing me. My feet have always been soft, and even though they’re now rock hard compared to my days stateside, they’re still like porous pin cushions compared to the ironclad heels of my Pinoy companions who spend their life barefoot or in flimsy flip-flops. Now the weak skin has worn away in the constant wetness and is exposed to what I am sure is bacteria-infested mud, and dozens of tiny little spots seem to be getting infected. I slather on some antibacterial ointment and go to sleep.
I awake to the sound of heavy rain and my first word of the day, at 6:00 a.m., is not something my mother would appreciate. I realize I am now probably actually traumatized, as hearing the downpour makes me irrationally fearful of another flood, another displacement, another cleanup, and we’re not even done with this one. I follow this pleasant start to the day by having diarrhea, which I’m sure is a result of mostly eating food that has been left out too long over the past few days, not to mention working all day in mud which I’m increasingly convinced is becoming toxic. My comforts of a sit-down, flush toilet and a showerhead have been stripped away and it’s back to the bucket shower and the short, seatless, tankless toilet that I can’t manage to use while squatting. As usual, I just sit down on it.
I stop by my office (it’s now a Tuesday) to check on the status of my neglected projects and am told to not worry about anything work-related. Still, our long-planned and oft-rescheduled livelihood training seminar will be taking place on Thursday. We now have half of upstairs free of mud, and the kitchen is also free of mud thanks to some help the previous day by yet another sibling. This leaves two bedrooms and the main living area, which is unfortunately sunken and still full of mud. I help clean one of the bedrooms until it becomes a two-man job and I find myself as the third wheel. I take the opportunity to clean out my backpacks, which I had been inordinately worried about to the same degree that I had been overjoyed to find that they hadn’t washed away. I guess for a Peace Corps volunteer who has been bouncing around and has more travel planned, bags are like home, and the thought of losing them is like my house being swept away.
I spend most of the afternoon upstairs washing furniture and
bailing out water. I become annoyed with the excess use of water by the
hard-headed brother. It’s as if he doesn’t understand that we have to bail out
every milliliter of water that we spray here during the process of cleaning. We
end too early and I find myself realizing that the cultural ethic of “there’s
always tomorrow” is applying. But the mud’s smell is increasingly nauseous and
I am dismayed and annoyed at the idea of it sitting there one extra day. When I
have free moments I’ve been prying open various drawers and occasionally holding
back vomit induced by the smell released by three days of muck.
Like anywhere, siblings working together in a stressful situation mean that a lot of squabbling takes place. Add that to the fact that people tend to sound like they’re arguing here even if they’re just conversing, and there are a lot of situations where I find myself shrinking away and going somewhere else. My host mother is at a breaking point – throwing things, swearing in English, saying she’d wish she’d die. I have to get away.
I leave the house and sit on a broken roadside bench with my five-year-old neighbor. It turns out that he’d finally been rescued during the flood by another brother after his hard-headed father refused to leave. (They’re both hard-headed – the rescuer also happens to be the excess water-sprayer.) We pretend that my plastic bag is a bag full of magic tricks and spend 20 minutes in a wonderful world of imagination, making up silly games. It feels like the scene in the Pursuit of Happyness where Will Smith and his son pretend they’re hiding from dinosaurs as they retreat to sleep in the bathroom of a subway station.
I return to the refuge house and write some notes that I will use to write this essay. My feet are killing me. The infections have made their way from my toes to the soles of my feet. After spreading on ointment, I have no energy left to leave my couch. I can’t believe there is still mud in the house and I am feeling very dejected and exhausted.
Today, I am determined to not infect my feet any further,
and to do my own thing. I have come to realize that although the pace of
cleanup is not to my liking, eventually rooms do get finished, and the main
living room is close enough to being done that there’s no way it won’t get
finished on this day. I set out of the house wearing the shoes I was wearing
the day of the flood and a dry pair of socks that I had happened to be carrying
in my bag. Getting my feet wet was probably unavoidable, but hopefully it would
come from the cleaner tap water and not the mud.
Sure enough, the living room is clean by lunchtime, with me only helping occasionally in between washing my shoes and rinsing all of my salvaged possessions, trying to save my books, which were to be donated to our burgeoning municipal library. The family’s extensive collection of VHS tapes is done for, but I rescue the CDs from the trash pile and begin washing and drying them. My host mom has spent most of the day at the river rinsing clothes, and another Peace Corps friend comes up from the city to take a big load of my clothes to a Laundromat. Not only will this save us work washing, but I’m getting worried about the mold infesting my clothes if they stay wet much longer.
As darkness falls, there is a brownout. Carrying the emergency light I’ve borrowed, I wearily trudge on wet, painful feet to my friend’s house. They’re surprised that I’ve returned the light, but I felt bad keeping it since the only reason they own it is for their use during brownouts. I return back to the house, eat dinner, and set up my mosquito net. Power comes in and out and eventually we’re able to sleep with the aid of the fan.
Instead of cleaning I attend the full-day training seminar we’re giving for my livelihood project on making goods out of recycled materials. I demonstrate to a group of women how to take plastic bags and iron them to make a new, more durable material, and then guide them through their first attempts. I sign certificates of completion and shake hands, all the while eating square meals. It is blissfully removed from the world of the flood.
I spend most of the day cleaning my salvaged possessions and trying to help with laundry in the river. I search the nipa area for clothes and manage to find a t-shirt of mine, in addition to a treasured pair of basketball shorts. I have now found three of my CDs, a few shirts, a sarong, a hat, and one slipper while searching around. Peace Corps delivers me a package including a new medical kit and a book that was intended for somebody else. Lacking any other dry reading material, I read it anyway. We have a brownout that lasts until 10 p.m., but the lights are now on in our house. An electronic wizard has been around the house and has managed to fix the television, refrigerator, and our electric fans. The toilet and shower are working again, and some semblance of normality is slowly returning to my life, but it’s a new normality combining the return of a few familiar things with the adjustment to many new ones.
It’s now Saturday, one week after the flood. I spend the
morning puttering around and cleaning things here and there while putting
together a list of things that I need in the city. I manage to get myself
locked in the bathroom, a combination of a faulty lock, swollen door, and my
own antiquated insistence on privacy. Luckily, the aforementioned electronic
wizard also turns out to be handy at busting open locks with hammers.
Before I head out of my town, I stop by a house that has been recommended to me as potential place to move. I have been convinced for days that there’s no way I’ll be able to live at my house again, which has bummed me out but seemed to be a grim yet unavoidable truth. But now that I’m eating lunch and dinner at my house again, and using the bathroom and the fridge, I wonder if I really need to move. The new house I look at is nice – a native hut on the ocean on the compound of a pleasant family. I wonder if I’ll someday regret passing up a chance to live in a hut on the ocean. But my memory will be tempered with the knowledge that there were no less than twenty fighting cocks directly outside the hut. And more than that, my current house is my home. I have developed an attachment to this family and to this place, and I am loath to start over with so little time left.
I head to the city and start checking things off my long list. Order new glasses. Pick up laundry. Buy replacements for the myriad of lost items. Eat junk food. Check into a hostel. I don’t take enough advantage of the dormitory bed that actually accommodates my body frame and instead spend too much time out with my friends. At this point, oddly, hanging out late and sleeping comfortably are equally rare escapes. I return to my house on Sunday afternoon to find that things are even more normal there. Besides our furniture and possessions being rearranged (or not yet arranged) and the fact that we still aren’t sleeping there, it’s at last more like a home than a cleanup site.
Throughout this experience, I have found myself increasingly wishing I was at home – Seattle home – even though I am determined to stick it out. Feeling displaced and homeless is not a pleasant experience, yet it is hard to really imagine what it’s like or truly empathize without going through it. And still, as dirty, tired, and displaced as I have been after my idyllic home-away-from home life was swept away, I have not fully experienced it. As long as my parents’ house in Washington state stands, I never will. While cleaning, I would find my thoughts drifting to details of my house that hadn’t crossed my mind since I last viewed them, if they even registered then. The back pantry, stuffed with food. The way the skylight casts shadows on the particular angles of our front entrance. The small drainage canal between our driveway and our carport. The way it feels to fully stretch out and take a nap on our couch. I use these things as a crutch and dream of returning to them a few months down the road, feeling like a victim, while the people here are stuck with rebuilding from what they’ve got.
In talking with some of the old-timers around town, a flood of this magnitude has not ever happened in anybody’s memory. Of course not, I reasoned – otherwise these houses wouldn’t be built like this. But then again, maybe they would. In many ways, susceptibility to disaster is a consequence of poverty and ill-advised treatment of the environment. Yes, it was the hardest it’s rained in a very long time, but the forest has also been denuded. Houses are built in areas that, if one stops to consider it, are surely historical floodplains. Yet population booms leave few other areas to build. Houses are built using light materials that are easily swept away. There is no money to build more sturdy dwellings.
Among the many things that struck me during this whole ordeal was a sentiment that people kept saying to me: Now you’ve really experienced the Philippines. Twenty-two months into my service, with everything I’ve experienced culturally, socially, on the job and personally, and only now, in their minds, had I really experienced the Philippines. It’s true that this country is prone to an abnormal amount of natural disasters, from typhoons and flooding to earthquakes, mudslides, and volcanoes. But that’s not unique, really – if I had been born four years earlier, I might have choked on some Mt. St. Helens volcanic ash as a two-month old baby. Instead, maybe what they were referring to was the spirit of the Filipino to pick themselves up, dust it off, and rebuild without getting too down about it. Even if it’s killing them inside.
Sometimes it’s easy to get complacent and forget about the poverty that surrounds you, or the precarious edge that people exist on even if they’ve managed to pull themselves out. My host mother worked for almost two decades overseas as a domestic helper to build this house and this life. Visa problems came along a few years ago and suddenly she found herself unable to work. Everything I worked for, gone in one day. What am I going to do? How am I going to replace this? These are things I have heard many times over the last week. And yet, luckily, most of our things are working again. She has contacts that can provide her with further assistance. But most of all, despite the occasional outbursts that are completely understandable, she has the most indomitable spirit that I’ve ever seen.
On one of my trips back to the nipa area to search for things that got washed away, I noticed a shiny gold CD case sitting on a branch like a beacon. As I drew nearer, I realized it was mine, having arrived in a care package a few months ago – the latest album by the hip-hop group Atmosphere. The title staring back at me read, “When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold.”
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Craig Bosman is a Peace Corps Volunteer currently serving in the Philippines (May 2007-August 2009) in the coastal resource management sector. His online journal chronicling his experience can be found at http://craigpeacecorps.blogspot.com.