This month was spent in the Philippines at an amazing ministry called the Kids International Ministry (KIM) in Tacloban. Two days after we got here we helped throw a Christmas party for 500 kids in the surrounding area. The party was complete with food, presents and hundreds of smiling faces. We also spent our time going out into the community and feeding the children who ran up to a rice porridge mixture. But what seems like a bright and happy place had been struck with disaster just two years ago.
One of the workers at the Lighthouse (where we stayed) told me his account of typhoon Yolanda…
It started like any day, it was sunny and nice so we thought that the typhoon wasn’t coming, at night we could see the stars. Then at three the rain started. We were staying at a church, my sister and her family were at a different church, so we weren’t together. When the rain was coming down, it was like any other storm. We watched the rain and the wind blow things around. And then it started. The wind picked up to 300 km per hour. We couldn’t see across the street, it was just grey. It was so loud it sounded like an airplane and the women sat there and cried. It hurt our eardrums. Then the water came. The ocean water came in and rose so fast we had to climb up to the attic. The children went first, then the women, then the rest of us. We sat up there for three hours. When the water finally started to go down we swam out to get food. We hadn’t eaten in 9 hours. People were going crazy everywhere. There were no laws, just survival. Everyone was trying to get food, you didn’t even have to pay. The streets were lined with dead bodies. Their faces were so distorted you couldn’t recognize them so they were left there until dump trucks came to collect them. It wasn’t healthy for us to be around all the dead bodies. They were placed in mass graves without labels because there were so many of them. When I went back to my house in the jungle, all that was left was the cement pillars. I collected my clothes from the trees….
This is just one of millions of survival stories. Some people clung to palm trees until it was over, some swam, many prayed.
There has been so much hurt here in Tacloban, but there is so much love. The people at the lighthouse truly bring light to the community and to those who get to experience it. We saw buildings broken and stripped of all but the foundation. We saw mass graves. We saw broken trees. But that’s not all.
We saw smiles. We saw hope. We saw love. We saw rebuilding. The people of the Philippines are a people of strength and are a people of faith. They are the light. Never in my life have I seen so much destruction yet so much hope.
It’s hard to see these things and see good. But I do.
I am so saddened by the lives lost and those that will always be affected because of Yolanda, but the amount of hope, light, love and faith I’ve seen blow me away. How we react to situations that happen in our life are a test of our strength, our faith and our character.
The Philippines are coming back stronger and with more faith. They have given me a glimpse of that and I will always carry that with me.
