June is such a drag

June is such a drag.

Iloilo became a raging sea. My cousin's family had to be rescued from their rooftop! They had a second floor but the water reached the second floor. They had to sail to safety on board an upturned table, dragging themselves away via rope.

My friend's family had to hightail it to their second floor, and their house has never been flooded before. Now they are cleaning it out but how to clean with no running water, a muddy well, no electricity. Who wants to clean when it's all mud anyway, all your furniture pickled in slime, no dry mattresses, nothing to sleep on, no food in the probably dead refrigerator, nothing cooking in the probably dead stove. And the dear oldies are stressed, stressed, stressed, no such thing as the comfort that was home. So trying to pick up the pieces. Now they need to buy again almost every piece of furniture/ appliance they ever had. Multiply this same story several hundred times.

My other friend's brother-in-law had to swim through 2-3 kilometers of highway to find food for his family, so submerged and swampy was their subdivision.

My friend's friend's family also upped and moved to their second floor. Their dad went down to get some clothes, they wondered what took him so long. And the next thing was he was floating in the water.

It took two days for rescuers to get near a boat that capsized. Two days! Can you imagine being tossed in a stormy sea for half an hour? Let alone two days? For those two days, mostly everyone knew about the upturned ship through the tv and the radio but the weather was bad, and perhaps, the inertia was the same. How hopeless. It took more than two days for the shipping line to make any statement to the growing mob of relatives keeping vigil by all their offices.

It took the electric company fifteen hours to respond to our calls for assistance as our electric post sparked and left our five houses in a row without electricity last night.

This is the problem when my assumption is that life should be a bed of roses.