Saturday, November 20, 2004

Today has been a very interesting day. When we left this morning it was raining a bit so of course we took our umbrellas. Well the rain started to get harder. We went by the church first because we are supposed to teach English there but there wasn’t anybody there. We decided to go by Bro Burley’s house but by the time we got there he told us that the storm had reached a signal 1 typhoon. It was really blowing hard and when we went out on the beach to look, the rain stunk our faces like thousands of little bullets. It was crazy. We decided that we’d go out go Dagupan because we still had to teach a music lesson to Sis Pulido. It took a while to get a jeep and the wind was getting stronger and stronger all the time. In Dagupan trees had started to fall over. We ended up not teaching music because the storm was so bad. We just stayed at Pulidos house and waited. The storm got sores and worse. Trees were going everywhere. We decided that we’d better go home and so we left when it seemed to be slowing down. We caught a jeep but the storm picked up even worse than the first time. We watched roofs get torn off houses and trees and telephone poles just breaking and falling everywhere. The jeepney got stuck in Dagupan because so many trees had fallen. We waited until the storm calmed down a bit more and then left the jeep and started to walk. On the main road there were probably 10 huge trees that had fallen across the path and we were walking back most of the way in the rain and in strong wind. There was tons of stuff destroyed and almost all of the power lines were down. Basically we experienced a signal 3 typhoon today. Lots and lots of houses were knocked down and it is just not a good thing. We are being told that we’ll be without power for probably a month or almost until Christmas because of the storm! This is going to be a really long month.

Me standing out in the Typhoon

Elder Cox in the typhoon

This was Typhoon Mufia that we experienced. It actually wasn’t as strong when it hit us on Mindoro but it definitely went right over our area. The whole article on Wikipedia is actually pretty cool!

Map plotting the track and intensity of the storm.(“Muifa 2004 track” by See file upload history for details. – Created using Wikipedia:WikiProject Tropical cyclones/Tracks. The background image is from NASA. Tracking data from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center.[1]. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.)

Satellite image of the typhoon.(“Typhoon Muifa 2004” by Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC – http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=6721. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.)