Here are two images taken in the aftermath of the recent typhoon in the Philippines sent to me by an acquaintance, after the Read More.
Where does the river end and the land begin?
Urban Tarzan
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Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!
Yet they abide. They are not sitting there wondering when someone (read the Americans) will come to save them. They are busy living.
One thing that the Western mind might find disturbing about these images is the concept of wetlands. Swamps are always places of terror. That might be because in Jewish cosmology the first thing God did when he created the world was he drew lines. He separated light from darkness and then he separated the waters above from the waters below and finally he parted the waters and the land. When the boundaries are broken, by twilight or by flooding the result seems to violate natural law. That is frightening.
That’s why it is so comforting to know that the Messiah will stop the rise of the oceans.
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What a horror. I heard parts of Manila had sixteen inches of rain in less than twelve hours, just unbelievable. My thoughts and prayers are with those who suffered through this storm and its aftermath.
Here are more pictures in the Boston Globe’s Big Picture photo blog (also linked on my name display):
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/09/typhoon_ketsana_ondoy.html
I assume the power is out in that second picture….
We got a call from MNL a couple of days ago, fortunately, our family there is fine. However, that is not the case for way too many people. Now Luzon is getting whomped again.
aaron @4
Being of the WorryWart Sort,
I would never be comfortable in that location/situation.
The ever-present water only exacerbating my anxiety.
Unfortunately, flooding happens in the Philippines regularly. Wretchard can amply testify to that, more so than I, a person who’s lived in the US practically all my life, can. Thing is, the frequency of the deluges doesn’t make them any easier to tolerate.
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I don’t have any relatives in Manila that I’m aware of, but there are a few down in Cavite, and more down in Cebu and Mindanao. While Parma is predicted to hit Luzon, those relatives on southern islands are still a little uneasy. A typhoon can change direction.
I don’t know whats worse, hitting areas of Luzon twice but keeping all the problems on or around that island, or going somewhere else and making the damage more widespread. On the plus side, the Philippines and America are friends, and the US military is already giving what assistance it can. Granted, it’s nothing like the outpouring that happened after the 2004 tsunami, but at the same time it’s far from being nothing at all.
They will blame this on global warming, and use it to push “population control” on locals, but the dirty little secret is that the flooded areas are lower than high tide level (developers ignored the reports, and the politicians let them build).
The sewers are inadequate (again, lack of will and diversion of funding to politician’s pockets) and full of garbage that stops runoff, and the silt from illegal logging (hint: bribe local politicians) clogged up the inadequate sewer system.
Local papers are starting to document exactly who did what, but don’t hold your breath to see things improved.
If things improve, it will be because the middle class neighborhoods were flooded, and some rich families suffered, not just the usual poor people…
The poor have developed survival systems to cope with the floods. First of all they have nothing. No cars to flood out; no electrical appliances that short. No expensive furniture to flood damage. Your average shanty is made of waste wood. I know. I built one myself. They’re made of scavenged galvanized iron roofing of various lengths. If there’s a hole in one, overlap it with another. If you run out of nails, weigh it down with rocks. Don’t expect any framing to be of the same size. One by two, two by two, two by four. If it hangs together, it’s cool.
All the nails were salvaged from pulling them out of rotted timber and hammering them straight. I’ve seen nails used so often they looked like a sine wave. And hammering them straight was a hassle, because even the hammers were crap; they were made of steel so soft they mushroomed out after a hundred or so nails. The saws were made from mild steel. Use them enough and the teeth all lay down. They made you laugh when you weren’t sawing. Do you want to make a lifelong friend? Give a shanty man a Stanley hammer. That’s a real hammer. People who own real hammers don’t know what a treasure they have. Heck I have a closetful of tools now just because I prefer it to an art collection. I lovingly run my hand over the cold chisels and ratchet screwdrivers because they are unspeakable wealth. I just like owning them even though I don’t really need them. A thing of beauty is a joy forever. Whoever said that must have owned a Stanley hammer. But ok? Why is poverty adaptation to disaster?
Because the poor, unlike the richer Filipinos, can put things right back together again after a storm. They live in Lego houses which can be fixed by Lego methods. The main thing in a storm is to ensure that if you lose a piece of roofing you get it back right quick or it will wind up on someone else’s roof. Finders keepers, losers weepers.
And then there’s the lack of clothes. You want a pair of shorts, some rubber-tire soled sandals and t-shirt, plus a plastic bag to ride out a storm. Keep your dry clothes in a plastic bag and stay wet the whole typhoon through. When it stops, put the dry ones on. The roof you have’ll be blown off anyway, so you’ll get used to it. If you have a bottle of Marca Demonyo, you can make a holiday of it. Why do you think the Mangyans have loin cloths? Look very carefully at all the pictures of Filipinos clambering over wires or going to work as if it were just an ordinary day. What do they have in common? They’ve got no real clothes. And believe me, you want that in Waterworld. All the guys who are taking the disaster in stride are poor Filipinos. The shanty men. For them catastrophe is normal. Typhoons can’t hurt them beyond killing them because they have nothing other than their lives.
I really pity the middle class guys who lost their cars, for which they paid dearly. The widescreen TVs, the tidy little beds. All the meager possessions of the hard working, aspirational man, but heck, he knows the deal. Living in the Islands is a lottery because while there is a Filipino people, there has never been nor maybe will there ever be a Philippine government. It is a memoryless bureaucracy. Every year two or three major storms come and the very next year the officials are surprised as if they just stepped out of paradise. The middle class know there’s no hope. And for this reason even the middle class aren’t going to be depressed. The next upgrade to the ruined middle class house is to emigrate somewhere else in the world. That’s the middle class solution: a studio in London or a place in Hong Kong or Portugal. Anywhere but under the memoryless government.
I heard a rabblerouser once rhetorically ask a group of listeners what they should do in the face of the pillaging, rape, robbery and abuse of the politicians. “They’ve stolen your land, raped your daughters, trampled your rights! What will you do?” The was a brief silence and someone answered, “emigrate”. Bingo.
But for the poor, who have nowhere to go, there is happiness and God. Back in the day, wading through tunnels of floodwater, pulling myself hand over hand past stretches of Malabon, Barrio Magsaysay, Vitas and wherever else, I’d sometimes stop somewhere and buy a glass of sago and syrup off a toothless old woman and think to myself how lucky I was to have met them. You have to understand the phrase “sa Tondo man ay may langit din” to fully comprehend the glory and sorrow of the shanty man. It means, “even in Tondo heaven exists”.
Rain on. They will survive.
Thank you deeply, Wretchard. Major dittos on the tool comments especially. My first thought seeing the photo of the flooded plain was: Are there no hills? It looked perfectly flat, and of course under water.
I get the wet clothing part and the plastic bag. What I’m wondering is what do you do for food? How do you cook the (stored) rice, and keep a stock of vegetables?
And isn’t flood water filthy and loaded with disease? If I was with children, it would be tough to endure patiently, worrying for their state.
I live 500 meters from a river, and really should get a good look at a topical relief map: I have no idea how close we are to flood level. I once heard a neighborhood flood alarm sound off (I live in Nagoya, Japan) but it didn’t stop me from going to sleep. Fortunately, no damage occurred that time.
Best regards, Peter Warner.
Wretchard, I love it when you ramble.
I get the wet clothing part and the plastic bag. What I’m wondering is what do you do for food? How do you cook the (stored) rice, and keep a stock of vegetables?
And isn’t flood water filthy and loaded with disease? If I was with children, it would be tough to endure patiently, worrying for their state.
Food is a problem if you’re cut off for more than 72 hours. It’s ameliorated by two things: the extreme simplicity of poor people’s food and canned goods. There are two contexts you have to consider. Up in the boonies people mostly eat rootcrops or cereals like plantains. The slightly better off eat rice or milled corn. If they’re really in funds there’s the piece of dried fish or chicken — about a spoonful per person is good eating.
In the city, the poor live off rice. Poor quality rice, it’s true but rice. One meal a day of that will keep body and soul together. People learned the old trick of sleeping through hunger. It’s a good trick. Lying down conserves calories and if you can successfully fall asleep, you’ll find the day passes until you get to cook that one meal.
When there are storms, you might pool your rice with someone who has a stove. Back in the day it was one of these pump-up things. Wood is unavailable and mostly wet in the cities. If things really get tough, then you simply use your social network, which is normally good for a few mouthfuls. But by hook or by crook, you’ll probably survive the 72 or 144 hours. It’s the kids that have it toughest. They cry and cry and nothing to feed them.
Regarding the filthy water, you will hardly give it a thought. The complete filth and lack of sanitation in a Third World slum would put Dickens to shame. I mean we are talking about nearly solid rivers of dead rats, mouldering wood, human waste, stagnant water that overflow or rush in through the floorboards in floods. It’s almost solid. In fact, you’ll be hard pressed sometimes, to find out where the land ends and the muck really turns by imperceptible degrees to liquid.
Of course the smell is something fit to knock you down. I lived for a time near Smokey Mountain, which was giant pile of trash that achieved international fame. At the time I regarded it as an exclusive address. There are lots of people who’ve strolled down Rodeo Drive. Tons of guys who’ve walked the bois du bolougne, but how many people do you know who’ve sauntered and visited with friends on Smokey Mountain? It burned night and day from spontaneous combustion, like a vision from hell. You could see it burning for miles out to sea. People say I’ve completely lost my sense of smell but I think my brain processes bad smells out.
But at any rate living in those conditions, if it didn’t kill you, gave you a nearly bulletproof stomach. Somehow you acquired a phenomenal resistance to waterborne pathogens that is hard to conceive. You probably know how Western European travelers are beset by Montezuma’s Revenge when they go to Bangkok or Mexico City. But those places are as nothing to what the Smokey Mountain man can endure. It’s fair guess that the average decent Third World denizen would go into convulsions if he had to drink the stuff we scarfed down.
I don’t wish to give the impression that it was a romantic life. Objectively it sucked. But I guess you couldn’t help but laugh at yourself. It was miserable to the point of being bizarre, and to have the lived it was to live in another dimension. You couldn’t describe it to ordinary people. I think Dumas said that time turns all experiences into sweet memory. I would not say all: Smokey Mountain was closed a while back and they moved the main dump to Payatas, I think, where some years back several hundred people were killed when there was a landslide of garbage that overwhelmed a shantytown in its shadow. Heck of a way to die; absurd almost. But that’s how it went.
Dear Wretchard:
Thank you for the extensive reply, sir. I’m deeply humbled and grateful.
Best regards, Peter Warner.