Was it real?

So on December 21, 2011 my partner asked me to join to the city to help. We packed some old clothes and went to the church we are most familiar with as they were doing 'something'.

As I'm a bit sceptical with charity type stuff and 'disasters' I was not really interested at first. I was even annoyed as my partner went back home to do something and left us in the church, where apparently there were enough people to 'help'.

I decided to walk around a bit and as the church is near the river and near the main bridge over the river I decided to walk over the bridge to see what had happened in that area as this is an area that has been flooded before and is kind of a typical squatters area.

And indeed, I was confirmed with my sceptisism: the houses closest to the water were gone and the houses a bit further from the water were just affected with mud, so many people were cleaning.

So my easy thinking was, see, those stupid squatters living on the riverside again... Their own fault... But please read on (or jump straight to it was real further below), as I think I was right, but I was also certainly wrong.

City quite normal

My partner was still not back as I returned after my investigation walking over the Marcos bridge and as there were no real victims to help I decided to do some of my own errands in the city.

The city looked quite normal though, although there was a lot of sand in the streets, so you could see something had happened. There was also a bit a strange feel, but besides those little things everything in the city appeared quite normal.

After about fourty five minutes or so I had finished my business in the city and returned to the church, where also my partner just arrived back. Still no feeling about real 'victims' in the 'evacuation center', so actually I was a bit bored and annoyed as it appeared the whole thing was about 'rescuers' and 'victims' each claiming their respective roles.

More business as usual or so

I was still a bit bored while my partner was driving through the city as I presumed we were going to some more 'disaster zones'. Again, not really business as usual in the city, but at the same time it was business as usual, so I didn't really get the point of 'disaster'.

When passing the first large 'evacuation center' my feeling changed a bit. Something bigger than the church seemed to be going on here. As we could not really stop, we passed and again, except for the evacuation center and some teens taking showers on the streets (nothing really exceptional here), although the setting was weird, nothing really unusual or disaster. Another ride for two kilometers or so and nothing really 'disaster'.

Yes, it was real

And then my partner drove some road down to somewhere I had never been. And then it was real. This was no 'Filipino overdoing', but a real disaster, like I remembered from the fireworks disaster in Enschede, The Netherlands.

Images say more than a thousand words. Click on the image to enlarge:

Innocent picture? Or not? Look fort the motorcycle.

Did not know this village, but it must have been...

And this is how we normally know the river here.

More images on the page images.