Pastor Lemuel
shared that he and his wife and three daughters stayed inside their church as
the typhoon beat upon it. They clung to
each other and hid by the beam that they believed to be the strongest part of
the church as it was collapsing all around them. There was no where they could run and any
attempt to leave while the 200 plus mph winds were ripping through their city
and hurling wood, metal roofs and anything else in the storms path would be
fatal. At one point, they noticed that
it grew quite. It was the eye of the
storm and as it passed over them they decided to flee to a safer place. Hours later, after the typhoon had passed
they returned to the church only to find it completely collapsed. If they had not fled during that small window
of time, they would all have perished.
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| Pastor Lemuel, his wife and their youngest daughter |
After our meeting with many pastors
we drove to visit a few of their churches before it got dark. Power to most of the city was still out and
only those fortunate enough to own a generator had light. When we arrived at pastor Rodin’s church, we
saw tarps covering where the roof used to rest.
The sanctuary was filled with tents, a few burners for cooking and
people still in the process of rebuilding.
“Warzone”
is the word that comes to mind when I think about how to describe the way the
city looked. I saw cars that had been
tossed, crushed and thrown around as if they were toys. Mile after mile we saw
nothing but buildings and homes that had their roofs torn off. We even saw a fairly large ship resting in a
village after it had been carried about a quarter mile inland by the ocean
surge.
When
it dawned on me that all the destruction that littered the city was already two
months old, I realized that the clean up and reconstruction is going to take
months –probably years in many cases– and that some of the scars to the land,
property and people would never heal.
The
next morning I woke up to choruses of rosters that went on for about a half
hour. This was accompanied by the sound
of a pump being manually operated to draw water from a well and to fill buckets
of water to provide for our washing and bathing. Not long after that you could hear the sound
of a chain saw echoing through the valley.
Not doubt, downed palm trees and pieces of wood that had been launched
by Yolanda were being cut up so that they could be disposed of or used for
rebuilding.
We drove about four hours from Dulag, the city we stayed
in over night, to the city of Ormac. We made as sobering pit stop as we visited one of the mass graves in the city.
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| Mass grave in Tacloban |
Although
Ormac did not have the near total devastation that Tacloban did, it did
suffer significant damage from very strong winds. Most of the heavy structures remained in
tact, but many structures made of light materials such as those with coco
lumber beams, ply wood walls, and metal roofs were blown away or
flattened. Sadly, that describes the kind
of construction of many of the churches in Ormac because they don’t have the
means to build sturdier structures.
We
met with about 30 pastors for lunch and then we transferred to one of the
churches that had survived the typhoon so that we could have a time of
sharing. We could see and hear workers
in the background as they were repairing the roof of the church, which had been
torn off. The reports were similar to
those we heard in Tacloban. The churches
and homes that were made of light materials were destroyed. Some were literally blown away to unknown
locations by the typhoon, some were washed away by the waters and others
collapsed into piles of rubble. As with
the pastors from Tacloban, they also reported that the attendance of their
churches had gone up significantly. Rain
or shine, people were crowding many of these churches, even though some only
had dirt floors, tarps for roofs, no walls, no sound systems, no place to sit
and no bibles. God had grabbed the
attention of thousands of people and these pastors are remaining faithful to
shepherds these scattered sheep.
We
began our trip back to Dulag and when the evening arrived, everything was
extremely black and the roads were very dark because there is no power in most
of the cities. To make matters worse, any
light that would have normally illuminated us from the moon and stars was not
to be seen because there were storm clouds in the air.
On
Tuesday we meet a pastor and his wife who shared how they had to stand on top
of the walls inside their house to survive as about 10 feet of water rushed in
from the ocean. This water swept in
about a half of a mile carrying cars, trucks, trees and remnants of homes. It devastated almost everything in its path. They explained that while the winds of the
typhoon was battering their roof, you could hear an eerie high pitched
sound. At the time, their house was
still under construction. The rough
structure was complete and the roof and windows were attached, but it remained
un-painted and without a ceiling. From
inside you could see clear up to the roof and the tops of the walls were
exposed, revealing where an attic would be if it had a ceiling. They explained that, as the water began to
rise, they and their children had no choice but to climb on top of the walls in
the house and to holding on to the columns that supported the it. Several neighbors joined them there to ride
out the storm because their homes were not as sturdy or as tall.
After
some hours the waters receded and returned to the ocean. The waters came and receded two more times
before they could begin to clear the mud and debris. Several families whose homes did not fare as
well took shelter in their home. Because
the floors were soaked and they only had a few beds, people took turns sleeping
while sitting on plastic chairs or on top of other furniture. They had no food for about a week so they ate
old muddy rice to survive. They thanked
God that their house remained largely in tact and that they did not get sick
from the food that they ate.
We drove through Tacloban
town proper again and went along the coast.
This was one of the places we had seen pictures of on the Internet and
on television reports. Thousands of
people lived there in small homes made of light materials. If somehow, any parts of these homes
remained after the high winds, what was left was no match for the 20 to 30 foot
ocean surge that hit the land like a freight train.
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