december. wow.

It's been a long month. It's been productive, I've been challenged, tired, and felt lots of different emotions. Let's see, where to begin...
At the beginning of the month, I went to Bicol (southeast Luzon) for a few days to meet up with friends to do some surfing in Bagasbas. Just as I stepped off my overnight 12-hour cramped, dirty, shoes-got-stolen bus ride from Manila, it started pouring. I had arrived jsut in time for a category 4 (5 being the worst) typhoon. Perfect surfing weather! We thought we could "wait out" (HAHAHAHAHA) the storm and continue with our vacation in Bagasbas. Not so much. By the time the cell towers were up a few days later, we started hearing about how destructive the storm had been. It's hard to know what's going on when you are locked inside, without power or phones, for 3 days. Turns out the storm had really rocked some areas of Bicol, resulting in close to a thousand deaths (most of which were presumed dead, buried under mudslides, unable to be reached) and left a million homeless. Yikes...
From there I traveled back to Manila for language "camp", a week of intensive instruction with our former langauge teachers from Balanga. It was great to see everyone. We were all pleasantly shocked to find that PC had put us up in a pretty nice resort with a pool, videoke, and edible food. It was relaxing and the perfect opportunity to catch up with everyone and swap stories (Most PCV stories include, but aren't limited to: poop stories, work stories, host family stories, physical ailments, language/cultural barriers, poop stories, what we miss from home, how annoying we get with certain people/situations, the weather, how cheap PC is, what a beaurocracy PC is, how bad the food is, who has mites/scabies/lice/worms, did i mention poop stories? yeah. that's kind of the cornerstone of our discussions.) Anyway, while enjoying langauge camp, i got a call from my regional director, our beloved Kuya Ambet, who asked if i would be willing to go to Legaspi, in Bicol, to offer counseling services at one of the evacuation centers with typhoon victims from the village of Padang. Kate, a social worker in Tarlac, and I were to fly there immediately. Most of the evacuees had lost family members and all had lost their homes. The plan was to fly out of Manila the following day, but another typhoon was headed straight for Legaspi, the same area that had just been hit. Planes were not flying in and out; PCVs in that area were evacuated. (dear god! give these people a break already!) Kate and I kill time in Manila for 2 days, waiting for the green light from PC higher-ups. We finally arrive on december 12, meet up with Julia, a volunteer who lives in Legaspi and whose apartment had been flooded out during the storm (check out the article she wrote for CNN at http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/12/10/typhoon.survivors/index.html ). PC put us up at one of the hotels in town with a generator (we were told power would resume in march) for a few days, and then we were able to stay at julia's as she had sufficiently mucked it out.
I had never been to a disaster site before. When we first arrived at Gogon elementary school, we were shocked to learn that roughly 2700 individuals, over 400 families, were now calling this small school "home". They were sleeping on top of one another. There was very little water, the CR (bathrooms) were a mess as there wasn't water to flush, alot of people were getting sick, many needed hospital treatment but were turned away because they had no way to pay for it. Among the devastating stories we learned about was a woman and her husband in their mid-thirties who had lost three of their four children in the mudslide. Padang was a village located at the base of Mt. Mayon, which is a beautiful, active volcano. Mayon is known around the world as the "worlds most perfect volcano", as its cone is perfectly symmetrical. It is indeed quite a site and it is a great source of pride to the people of this region. The most recent eruption was in August, when many villages were evacuated. Lahar, or ash, had accumulated along the sides of the mountain since the August eruptions. When the typhoon came through, the heavy rains pushed the lahar, along with large boulders, onto the villages below. Consequently, it was the mudslides, not the rains persay, that caused the most destruction. There were still hundreds of bodies that had not been recovered, as they lacked the manpower and equipment to do so.
Our time at the Gogon evac site with the Padang residents was busy. The children will not be in school for some months, they had nothing to play with, and nearly all had been traumatized by this event. They wondered around, glassy eyed, looking for sticks and tires to roll, or sticks, bags and string to make kites to fly. They had nothing. The other volunteers and I set up structured activities for them every morning (a make-shift camp), with physical games and activities, art and music. Basically, we kept them busy. We sang with them, cried with them, hugged them, tried as best we could to communicate with them, fed them. They smiled and laughed everyday and hung all over us, longing for attention and affection that they were not receiving elsewhere due to the horrific curcumstances. We took donated funds from our ever-generous families in the States and supplied materials for games and activites, school supplies, food, and small Christmas gifts. We had a christmas party, dressed up our friend Alvin as Santa, and gave them a spaghetti dinner, new tsinelas (flip flops) and t shirts. we supplied hygiene products, basic kitchen supplies, clothing, bare necessities. every night we held a teen group with the teen leaders that were our helpers throughout the day, and that we could not have managed 200+ childeren without. the teens cried, they laughed, they sang, they shared thier experiences. they grew to lean on eachother, which we encouraged they continue to do after we left.
I have come away from this experience with astonishment and admiration of the resilience and optimism of the Filipino people. Every day they would smile when they saw us, they would thank us profusely for what little we had to offer for so many bodies that needed so much. There is only so much we could do, and every night when we would stumble home, physically and emotionally exhausted after 13 hour days, we would continue the brainstorming into the night. How to best use the donated money, which therapeutic methods would be most effective, how to handle the sheer volume of problems that were, in a word, overwhelming. But then the next day we would arrive again and the kids would race toward us, wearing the same dirty, ripped clothing they had been wearing since the day we arrived, giggling and wanting to know what we were going to play today, what time the games started, whether or not Ate Suzie and Kuya Page would be joining us. They did now dwell on what had hapopened, they wanted to get on with life, with their enjoyment of life, with their laughing and singing. So thats what we did. We played until we felt like we couldnt stand, and then we played some more. The last day, we took a couple hours to visit Padang. It had been a fishing and rice farming community, lush and green before the mudslide. Where we stood, it was a ghost town,

with the intimidating Mayon as a backdrop. You could see the green on either side of the mudslide path, but where we were standing, where hundreds of homes had stood, there was nothing but ash. It was hard to imagine the little ones we had grown to love at the evac ctr, clinging to the trees as the force of nature pushed their homes and their loved ones past, leaving nothing but a black, ominous path in its wake.
The day before Chritmas Eve, we flew back to Manila. It was hard to say goodbye, but we knew our time there had been well-spent. It was certainly a Chritmas gift i will never forget: a perspective check of epic proportions. I headed to Mindoro to spend Christmas with some friends, and from there we went to White Beach in Puerto Galera to camp. The plan was to continue on to Boracay for New Year's, but, (shocker)...i got sick again. So home i came, and somehow slept through the culmination of fireworks and singing, which had been gaining momentum since September.