Takeover II

I didn't get finished with all the "typhoon" items that I have on-file, when I posted the last issue.  Actually, there's far too much to ever get it all covered here. And of course there's the "redundant factor," where another photo of a tree blown over or a house flattened  just doesn't have much impact (unless it's YOUR house - - -).  But there are still a few more items-not-covered which I'll put up, maybe half- a- blog's- worth, then I'll try to work in another "short topic."

The main road into "Tibiao proper" turns off the National Hwy. about a mile from our house, and it goes about 1/2 mile from the hwy. to the town square area.  The typhoon had been from about 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Friday; as of mid- afternoon on Saturday,  there was still a lot of debris and downed wires to be cleared out.   Only the smallest vehicles could make it through the area until sometime on Sunday.

In Tibiao, the multi- purpose covered area, where tricycle taxis gather on market days, was one of many structures which lost parts - or all - of their roofs.  Six months later, this one still awaits repairs.

Through the whole swath cut by the typhoon, communications were knocked out; some, like the main fiber-optic cable for TV and internet, were not replaced for months.  But 3 days after the typhoon, someone discovered a good "hot spot" for cell-phone reception near Barbaza, about 10 miles from Tibiao.  Overnight, on a deserted stretch of Highway, this tent village of cell-phone vendors sprang up, perhaps about 30 tents with portable gen-erators and chargers; food vendors, access-ory vendors.  We went there on Tuesday and were able to send text messages to a few people  in the USA; our first contact since the storm.  "Tattoo" which you can see on the tent-canopies, is the name of a wireless "air-card"  and cell-phone provider here.  Their service doesn't work very well in Tibiao, our area, for lack of enough towers or whatever infrastructure. 
(NOTE tricycle-taxis in foreground; article about them is available from February 2013; the archive navigation at upper right will get you there pretty quickly) 

Six days after the typhoon, on Thursday, I rode with missionary Mark Moses, heading north along the National highway for about 50 miles to evaluate  the immediate relief needs of people there, and to look at damages to church buildings and plan for reconstruction materials.  Here is the link to the Google Map of our area.  **(see below) From Tibiao, we passed through Culasi, Sebaste, and Pandan to a place near the Libertad border, just where the coast of Panay island turns and heads west.  All of these places were in the hard-hit 


swath, but west of Pandan there was almost a "line" where the damage was suddenly much less.  The photo above is near the main square in Pandan.  At left, the family was in their house during the typhoon when the entire roof blew off.  Mark and the team left relief food supplies at each place we went, and made lists of needed repair supplies and plans for how to deliver them.

This small church building at Pandan was one of the places we went that first Thursday, Nov. 14.  This photo is from one week later, Nov. 21, as the needed lumber  is out in front of the building.  On that day, we visited all the same sites as the week before, and we made contact at one point with the "jeepney" vehicle which was chartered to haul the supplies from San Jose.  (see  posting from January 2013 about jeepneys.  Blog archive navigation is at your upper right.)

Back at Tibiao, this 30-foot tree had fallen at the beach near our relatives' place.  The bend in its trunk, resting on the ground, created a 15-foot springy-pole for the kids to bounce on; the little guy nearest is about 8-feet off the ground. I have a too-blurry photo which shows more than a dozen kids all at the same time, riding on the tree.  It was there for 5 or 6 weeks before someone got around to removing it.




I was quite impressed with this man's  skill, as he balanced between the ladder and the roof and managed to make powerful, accurate hits with a machete left-handed for about 15 minutes.  I noted later when he was working on the ground, that he is right-handed.  There was very little special equipment to work with, but the people here are expert improvisers who do amazing things with simple tools, routinely.  Note that even the ladder is home-made from bamboo lashed together.

Long-term effects:  one of the long-term effects of the typhoon will be its impact on bamboo usage and availability.   At left is an example of mature, good quality bamboo.  Note the thickness of the "walls;"  this solid bamboo takes perhaps 5 years to grow, and in use it may last a number of years before termites and rot destroy it.  Bamboo is a vitally important material here; many people can't afford any other material to provide their housing.  



Here is a comparison which shows immature poor quality bamboo of perhaps 3 years' growth.  Before Typhoon Yolanda, there was already a shortage of mature bamboo in our area; since then, a lot of immature bamboo has been cut of necessity to build housing. Big problem: this immature bamboo will rot out much sooner than mature stuff, and it also will not be available as mature bamboo  2 or 3 years from now - a "vicious cycle" of shortage.

The same kind of supply problems will occur with other vital materials.  Many thousands of trees were destroyed, which would have provided lumber and fuel for sometime in the future.  I could include photos of firewood stacks and slabs of tree-trunk stacked, but I think you already know what those things look like.   In our post-typhoon cleanup we generated lots of these materials and we are blessed to be able to save some of it for use in the next year or two; many of our  neighbors a few hundred feet away have no such opportunity.
Relief supplies were in very small quantities for the first couple weeks - but about 3 to 4 weeks after the typhoon, government and NGO  trucks began arriving quite regularly and distributing goods at "barangay" (means neighborhood) halls to residents who were listed by the barangay officials.  This huge "straight truck" had been chartered by an NGO to deliver relief goods; this occasion seems to be in January, and such distributions have only recently tapered off.



Meantime, life had gotten pretty well back to "normal" for us, with a fairly constant flow of daily routines mixed with small projects to hopefully improve our situation in a little at a time.  Our poultry flock increased, and we had small successes with vegetable raising. We waited what seemed like forever  for the main communication cable to be repaired - but I did sometimes find a use for the internet cable which runs between houses on our property.

Quick flashback look: About January 1, 2013 I was standing about 6 feet farther to the right, from where the above photo was taken. The bamboo post that the screen- door leans on is the same corner post of the bamboo house above - - barely started in construction then; and our house, shown above, is not even begun; its excavation work began about January 14, and we "moved in" on July 4, 2013.




There's room here to cover a few other short topics.  I've made quite a few photos of various occupations I see nearby, and will post a few of the ones which I think will seem novel to American readers.

In a farm-field surrounded by woods and brush, a mysterious structure is built.  It's            circular, about 12 feet in diameter and 5          feet tall, and resembles photos I've seen          of the "Hogan" which some Native American tribes build.  But it isn't a house; it's a tightly-stacked pile of hardwood branches, tightly covered with large green leaves like banana leaves. This is set on fire and controlled carefully for several days to prevent too much oxygen from getting to the fuel - so that it will smolder and slowly be converted to charcoal. The process seems to be a mixture of science and art;  I don't have the language skills to get much detail, but this is another vital material which is used in our area.  Charcoal burns slower and  puts out a much steadier heat than firewood; and, it doesn't require a special stove or tanks like propane.  Our household uses quantities of firewood and charcoal daily for cooking which would otherwise consume lots of much-more expensive propane.  Charcoal production is banned at the moment because of over-harvesting of hardwood, but this ban was apparently overlooked for a while after the typhoon, as lots of downed hardwood was available, so on several occasions I saw charcoal being produced in this manner.


Hand-made equipment is in use at a lot of businesses here.  I've made photos of quite a few improvised production machines, and here are a few.

Huge wire coils apparently salvaged from some industrial site are set into a rack and seem to be adjusted up and down with a "peg through hole" setup.  This is an improvised arc-welder; industrial made machines use an adjustment jack-screw to move coils.  The size of those coils suggests this would be a an immensely powerful welder, despite its rustic appearance; I would think keeping its
output DOWN enough to be useful would be the main concern in operating it.  I've seen more than one welding machine like this one nearby.
The location of this switches- and- plug combination amused me.   It was on the public office- wall of our local electrical cooperative utility company. 

Quite a large band-saw is made from galvan-ized water pipe for framing, with 24-inch wooden main-wheels made from laminated thicknesses of plywood.  Standard industrial-machinery parts are used creatively for blade-guides and drive- train.  

A heavy-duty wood lathe features a vehicle transmission as its headstock.  The "rails" are made of heavy 2 x 10 lumber and it can turn pieces 8- feet- long.  The project in place appears to be some sort of large hardwood pulley, like on a ship's rigging.  Just beyond the lathe are two hand-made table saws, which have 12-inch and 16- inch blades.  All of these machines are turned by a long shaft which runs on the floor behind them, and power is supplied by a 12- horsepower diesel engine of the same sort which powers the walk-behind farm tractors here.

An occupation in our area is whatever a person can find to make some pesos ("bucks" would be the USA expression.) When Bernadette was offered our house- property 12 or so years ago, one reason she immediately "grabbed it" is that it is located on the elementary school road. She saw the potential of snack-vending to the kids and other pedestrians who pass by in great numbers daily.  When daughter Thea visited for a few weeks near the end of school- year, we happened on a supply of jicama ("hick- uh

muh") - which is pretty familiar now in USA groceries - radish-like flesh, "puckery" sweet grapefruit- like flavor. We got many, many sacks in a 2-week period.   These were cleaned, sliced thinly, and placed in plastic vending-bags;  with a little sea-salt on the side, they sold in hundreds of units per day, at our front gate. Thea's income from this short-term venture was some days near-double the working-man's wage in our area!  Imagine living in a place where "free enterprise" is not quashed by regulations - - - -  Thea's fingerprint ridges were dissolved by her handling the acidic tubers - - which made me wonder if some useful "free enterprise" could be found for a temporarily fingerprint-less person  (insert here, smiley-winky face.).

I've tried a few new things with this posting.  I thought the left-side/ right-side format would look more interesting than a straight vertical row of photos. However, the photos must be much smaller to make this happen, so details are harder to see, and I also had a very difficult time getting the text to wrap around the photos - the word-processor part of the program was extremely resistant to doing that.  I welcome comments as to whether the finished result is any improvement over the previous format; right now I'm pretty much inclined to retreat to the single-column of larger photos.  Sometime later I'll experiment with putting comparison photos side-by-side - but the photos would have to be quite small;  this program doesn't allow custom-sizing photos and inserts, but offers 4 or 5 "stock" sizes to choose from.  

Another new attempt is that it's the first time I've tried to place a webiste "link" in the blog - the link to the Google map site.  As this that I'm working on is only a "draft" blog, the link is not operable; I'm eager to get this actually published so I can see if it works OK.  (**NOTE After publishing, I found that the link given opens the map near Pandan, not Tibiao.  You can "drag scroll" the map up, to get to Tibiao, or click the "search " icon which is at the upper left of the map and that will also get you to Tibiao).

In the last blog posted before the typhoon, I showed about half of the rice-harvest-and process which puts food on peoples' tables here.  I expect to show the rest of the rice process sometime soon, plus several other topics that I have planned on a list here, and a large number of "miscellaneous" photos from time to time.

Meanwhile we hope that your days are blessed and prosperous, and that you occasionally have time to reflect on the wonder of simply being alive and passing through all of life's varied experiences.  

Have a great day!

Tim and Bernadette Larson,  Philippines

Hostile Takeover

A "hostile takeover" in business usually involves a high-powered businessman - a tycoon.  In our little world of Antique Province, Philippines, the hostile takeover of November 8, 2013 was embodied in a typhoon.  Typhoon Yolanda (apparently called "Haiyan" everywhere outside the Philippines, go figure) and its aftermath literally took over peoples' lives in this area for four or five  months (and it certainly was not friendly).  Some of the specific after-effects will continue for several years.

It was one of the strongest, most deadly tropical cyclones ever recorded.  More than 6,200 people perished in the Philippines; I don't know the numbers for other places. The wind-speeds were given as high as 165 and 170 miles-per-hour at landfall; fortunately for us, landfall was several islands and a few hundred miles to the east of us, with the storm moving westward over the central "Visayan" islands of the Philippines. We got the last of it, being the farthest west, but we were right under the middle where we caught everything there was to catch, and that was plenty.  "Just like in the books," we first had two-plus hours of incredible winds from one direction (north) as the storm moved in from the east; then nearly two hours of complete calm as the "eye" passed over us;  then two-plus hours of wind from the south as the counter-clockwise rotation of the storm passed its trailing edge in the opposite direction.  I have experienced 75- to 80- mph winds a number of times, and this wind was by far stronger than anything I could have imagined.  We were very blessed to have it ALL in daylight; the passage here was between about noon and 5:30 p.m.  The confusion, fright and panic would have been much worse at night-time.

My regular readers already know we had no harm and very little damage.  We're grateful for that, but sad to see the amount of damage to the homes of "the poorest of the poor" nearby.  We saw none of the subsequent news coverage of photos and videos and heard no news reports - our communications cable was taken out by the storm, and is only now restored for about a week, after 24+ weeks without TV or internet service.  One local radio "talk + news" program was available on our battery- portable radios for several hours each morning, but its broadcast is in the local language so I didn't "get", much of it.  All of you have probably seen lots more than I did, but I will put up some of the photos I took especially looking at "before" and "after" plus some of the odd or ironic things that struck me at the time. 

   Here's a typical view of our street as seen from the main highway.
The elementary school roof is visible at the far end, about 100
meters from the intersection.  The banged-up corner of the bus 
stop in upper left serves as reference point for the next photo.

The morning after the typhoon, as seen from about the same point.

Halfway along the street, looking left from our gate towards
the school.

 As the eye of the storm passed in mid- afternoon, several
hundred people rushed to take shelter at the school.  Many
more joined them when the second "blow" ended at 5:30 p.m.

 In the confusion, one tiny flip-flop dropped from its owner's foot;
perhaps recovered later, perhaps not.

A "leaf tunnel" where the only passage through the street was
where the top of the tree rested against the opposite-side fence.

Approaching the school, that's the neighbor's carport leaning
where it was blown across the street into a fence.

In weeks and months following, this was a common scene;
people waiting in line for distributed "necessities."

The school was in fair shape: Some roof damage but far better than the area surrounding our mostly-concrete-house street.  Several hundred people camped out there for more than a month as they struggled to build any sort of structure to replace houses.  Relief supplies and media coverage to our area were pretty scant for several weeks; the outside world's attention was mostly directed towards the east side of the islands, where all the crews had gone before the storm in anticipation of its landfall.

Meantime, out in the neighborhood, things were pretty rough

all over.  The concrete walls remaining are the bathroom of

one house at the back end of my in-laws' family compound.

The canoe may have been placed against the tree keep 

from blowing away; or maybe the storm put it there.

This little picket-fenced cottage had been just behind the house
in the previous photo.  Always very trim and well-kept, before.

After, the only way I'm sure it's the same place is that the
canoe is barely visible leaning against the tree at right.

A few steps away, one of Bernadette's uncles is clearing
debris away from his place.  The panels of this house, and
others, were straightened and re-used when possible.

One odd little thing I noticed was this pair of shoes which

were still hanging there, after nearly everything else was gone.

Out on the main road, utility poles and wires were everywhere
for the first 2 or 3 days.  No worry about handling the wires during
cleanup;  there was no electricity for 3 weeks!

Calm after the storm:  Mother hen bosses the chicks as usual.
Several canoes are parked along the road at top - moved
before the storm to keep them from blowing or washing away.

 Everybody helped to try to regain "normal" in the days after the storm.

This place is on the east side of the main road.  It fared no better
than more-exposed places on the "beach" side, to the west.

 "Morning after" yard cleanup at our place.  Yesterday, the thicket of
bean and squash vines plus a papaya tree was so dense you
couldn't have seen the house door from here. Now, they're GONE!

But what remained, a few feet away, was this spray of tiny
orchids, entirely undamaged; another of "many odd little things."

Electricity being out for three weeks went beyond inconvenience to hardship in my opinion.  In this climate of high temperature and very high humidity, there just is not enough absorption "margin" for a foreigner's body to cool itself - - the air is already too "wet" to wick away perspiration - - the body cannot cool itself - - and you feel like you're literally in a slow-cooker.  I "adapt" by staying close to an electric fan whenever possible, otherwise I quickly begin to overheat and heat stroke would be a possibility.  I carried a sprayer bottle, kept wet with water fairly often, and did anything I could to keep cooled down.  At night I think EVERYONE was waking up with the bed soaked with sweat, and nothing to do about it. I would get the battery- LED light and read for awhile, then try to get some sleep - - but little success.

 At the end of 3 weeks we sure were glad to see this guy arrive one
Friday.  Here, he's using a fiberglass pole with a hook - -

to seat our service line in the split at the top of a bamboo post we

provided.  From this post, at the highway corner, he stretched the wire - -

to a tree near the corner of our property, and a few minutes

later, we were hooked up!   Hurray!

Well, I have lots more photos of the aftermath and rebuilding from several months of activity since the typhoon.  I'll continue the story next time, but probably will do some shorter topical "segments" in blogs instead of keeping each post on one topic.  Lots has happened - -

We are very blessed to have never missed a meal, to have only slight damage, to have always had cooking gas and other means for preparing our food;  we have learned to notice our blessings a little better than we did before.  We are relieved to finally have cable reconnected, as it is our most reliable means of contact with any place beyond our immediate area.

We wish all of you the best - a Happy and Prosperous 2014 - 

Tim and Bernadette Larson,   Antique Province, Philippines