Which Side of the Knife, Amidst the Trials.

A knife can cut you depends on how you handle it.
If you handle the blade it might cut you, if you hold the handle that is a different story.

Last 2009, there was a flood in Metro Manila.
Little by Little the water rosed up to the roofs of houses.
I was one of the victims of that sudden flooding.

I am renting an apartment in Pasig City. During Fridays after the office I usually go back to my parents house in Pampanga.
On that particular Friday nights I got an invitations by former office mates (Now living in Singapore) to spend some time with them in the coffee  shops. I was schedule to go back to my parents' house but we spend chatting till 12 midnight. I decided to go back to my apartment and rest.

I woke up around 10 am, my housemate told me, the streets are already flooded. I got irritated. The city government started to dig for canals during that time, so I am blaming them for it. Why build a canal in the middle of the rainy season, it makes the street flooded I told myself. My roommate went out and I lie again in my airbed.

My room mate hurriedly   went back and told me that the water is rushing in. I got again furious, why dig in the middle of the rainy season. So I got up, check outside really the water was rising. Wow, I can't believe it. My room is on the first floor and all my stuffs are on the floor.As the water rises, I was busy picking up my stuffs.

I was able to put all my stuffs on higher level. We have a kitchen sink, that is where I put my things, since it was raining and the ceiling of the apartment was leaking. The kitchen sink is always wet during rains. I decided to put all my stuffs in the second floor of our house.

So that was it, we closed the door, during that time the water was only heel deep. We did not bother to put the other things to the second floor. It got us tired moving the things up. We slept, my room mate woke up and went down, then he hurriedly called back. Our first floor is now submerged waist deep.  There were two computer tables downstairs, we did not carry the monitors to the second floors. To our surprised they became instant aquariums.

We went outside to see the situation. Being Pinoy, which other people from the globe find amusing we posed in-front of the camera still with a  smiling face (Exception the ones that posed in-front of the killer tourist bus at Quirino Grandstand, this too was too weird for me). Smiling in the outside but deep inside we are worried. I called my parents thinking of the worse things to be. I am sure any moment our cellphones will lose signals. Connections from outside will be cut.  I was able to contact my mom and told her, We are find no need to worry.



After settling our stuffs to the second floor. We decided to go out. We help our landlady carry their things to their second floor. I saw they even made an effort  to tie their sofa to the ceiling. While we are carrying the things of our landlady. One room mate who is very afraid of cockroaches experience something he never wanted to. The cockroaches are not like fish that can breathe underwater, so while we are carrying the gas range and the refrigerator to the second floor, the roaches too were trying to climb, well not to the second floor but to our bodies. Writing this stuffs still gives me goosebumps, but I found it entertaining because my roommate cannot do anything. He endured carrying the appliances to the second floor while roaches are sticking to his torso. He seems to dance while doing it :). After this he overcome his phobia of roaches, maybe ^^.


Too bad we can not carry the car:(. Our landlady has two cars, one was still new still with plastic covering the chairs. They bought it two weeks before this happened.

So the water continued to rise, we can not leave the apartment anymore. I can not swim, and where to go?. So we decided to spend that day in our room at the second floor. In the apartment we are 5 boys. Two of them came from Pampanga and they left for home on Friday night. So Three of us stayed in the house to carry the stuffs to the second floor. We are lucky one of our house mate went to buy a grocery before. We had emergency food because of him.




We monitored the water level, until it finally submerged the ceiling of our first floor. Now we are scared. The rain is still pouring and  water is still rising, only one stair and it will reached our second floor.


During the night we heard someone calling for help. Their house were not higher than ours and they are worried, until how much the water will continue to rise. Our house has stairs and we can accessed till the fourth floor of the next house. Without second  thinking we asked them to go to our tiny room. If ever the water rise much more  we can all climb until the third floor or higher. We were surprise to find out that our neighbor just gave birth some days ago, so that is why they were really worried. We let the woman cross the fenced with still fresh stitches and her baby got her first adventure in life.

They thanked us for letting them stay in our house, but we are also grateful they let us saved them, without them we would not eat meals for 2 days and 2 nights. They are more intelligent. They brought their food and cooking stove in the second floor of their house while we are carrying computers. We are save from starvation :)

This  flood made us connect to our neighbors which we never talked to in normal living. We even met a cute girl in the next apartment. The following pictures are the pictures after the first day.

Our Submerged Barangay

Breast Stroke in the flood

I remember this bed, this was the bed we discarded because it got holes.

After the water settled down. Relief goods where distributed. Our company too gave us some food and also to other office mates who got affected by the flood.

 

Bump Trucks

So our company gave relief goods to those who got affected.

While giving the relief goods people are still smiling in-front of the camera amidst the things that happened.  I have a Japanese friend who works for an NGO she told me, they too gave relief goods to the evacuation centers and took pictures for documentation. They can not submit  most of the pictures because people tends to smile in-front of the camera.



For Other Pictures of the 2009 Ondoy Flooding here is a link below:

Ondoy Pictures at Pasig City

Maybe out of the flood topic  but to return to the page title. 20 Years ago A sleeping volcano  woke up and buried almost all of Pampanga. It was a disaster. Houses and farmlands were buried under by sands from the volcano. As one video I saw, the people in Pampanga saw it an opportunity to have a living, now those sands are used for constructions. Also during the the attacks of locust the people from Pampanga made something positive from that plague, we got instant food from heavens :)

here is a link, but I think you need to Log In to FB to see.

Pinatubo Video by Arvin Paul Lingat