40 days and 40 nights.

I rarely write about “current events” but the farcical tragedy of the last four days has led me to tell the story (from my point of view), in a small effort to raise awareness, and to start some kind of discussion about the incredibly tangled failure of 3^rd world governments and countries, and of the growing obviousness of “climate change”, which is pounding the world with a heavier and heavier fist.

On Monday of this week, until today, Thursday, unusually heavy rains, mostly due to an offshore hurricane, blasted Western and Central Luzon (the states of the island of the Philippines I live in). Some places were so badly affected that 32 emergency evac centers were put in place, and 17,000 individuals made use of them. Water as high as a HIGHWAY OVERPASS surged through the lower level shantytowns, destroying tens of dollars worth of property (okay, that was a little mean, but it’s not far from the truth. Many areas, to my uninitiated eyes, looked exactly the same in the “before” and “after” shots, except for the buttinski of a large, light coffee colored river of deadly bacteria laden water flowing through it). According to the local newscasts, the biggest problem the local rescue forces faced was getting people to leave their property.

As for me, I was very fortunate to have power most of the time, and since I was in a 3^rd story building that was set slightly higher than the road, our building was okay. The road itself was completely submerged and impassable by vehicles. In order to grab snacks and some beers for passing the time, I had to wade through knee high water  (in pouring rain). Needless to say, I didn’t go to work for those days, as visions of being trapped on a flooded highway on ramp, in the dark, in the pouring rain, were dancing in my head.

I can’t really say what was more scary, disappointing, or frustrating: the scenes of thousands packed (I must say, pretty cheerfully, props to them) into “covered areas” (that’s like, an outdoor podium with a roof that’s doubling as a rescue area), the video footage of people digging through a nature made dam of “wood, stryofoams, and trash” to try to find usable rubble to rebuild their shanties, or the story that a certain neighborhood had been repeatedly warned in 2009 not to rebuild after a landslide, built anyway (for complex reasons that I won’t even try to parse, but most likely revolving around money, strong family ties, and fear of relocating), and then lost 9 (including an infant) in an identical landslide on Monday.

President Ninoy Aquino, wearing a shiny coated denim jacket, was flanked by (I think? Most broadcasts were in Taglish, which I can only get about 50% of, or heavily accented English) the Marine Corps leader, wearing a raincoat yellow windbreaker, addressed the nation and discussed how he had to insist on the release of some extra rubber rescue boats, since these boats were initially deemed “not ready” for use. Okay, people? What are we keeping 75 unusable rubber boats around for? Posterity?

The existence of the boats, the unsolvable tangle of issues that most likely meant they went unrepaired or un-upgraded, the shilly-shallying about maybe just releasing them anyway and giving it the old college try, the fact that we (as a country) didn’t learn from a very similar tragedy in 2009 and see to those boats then, when the attention (and the wallets) of the world was primed, the need for these boats in the first place (my road has only 1 storm drain per mile or so. ONE. And this is in a tropical monsoon country. Most streets are not built in any kind of grade that would encourage runoff, either). Roofs are flat  or very shallowly graded,(my local grocery store, ShopWise, has gutters that pour rain out onto the un-drainable parking lot, like firehoses. Way to double your pain, ShopWise), there are no public garbage cans or dumpsters, so flooded roads become cesspools very quickly, the lack of a centralized system to handle this (like the National Guard or the Red Cross (we have the Red Cross here, but as far as I can tell, they’re busy handling infant mortality, child trafficking, and drug running, and have their hands full), and so on and so forth.

I was lucky. Me and a friend watched TV, waded to a pizza parlor and had pizza, put together a big puzzle, and had some extremely sweet 5% alcohol wine cooler thingies (those things are a guaranteed headache, but they are so cheap!), and had some fun. But it’s easy to have fun from the 3^rd floor. It’s life on the ground floor that’s shaky.