A Creemore native has been given a glimpse into the enduring strength of another culture after finding herself stranded on an island in the Philippines by Typhoon Haiyan.
Melissa Striegl, 28,was staying on the island of Coron in the South China Sea when she began hearing rumours of an oncoming typhoon.
Striegl, who was visiting Asia for the first time, was capping off a two-week-long business trip in Manila with a week of touring the islands by boat.
On November 7, she was having dinner with friends and preparing to return home to Toronto the next day.
However, when the owner of her hotel tried calling for a van service to drive her to the airport the next morning, none was available because of the typhoon.
Haiyan is the deadliest typhoon to hit the Philippines since Typhoon Thelma killed 8,000 people in 1991. It has caused catastrophic destruction; the death toll is now estimated at more than 4,000 people.
At first, Striegl tried thinking of other ways to get to the airport because she didn’t want to miss her flight. But then she learned there were no more flights leaving the island.
In a demonstration of hospitality, the hotel owner assured her the hotel was a safe place and invited her to stay there free of charge until the airports were running again. At the time, Striegl was the only tourist checked into the hotel.
“At first, it seemed like a normal thunderstorm,” Striegl said, of the wind and the rain. Although the Internet wasn’t working, she derived some comfort from being able to send text messages to her boss in Manila.
“The Filipino people were acting normal. I felt that if this were any other place people would be putting down bags of sand and storing water, but here, nobody seemed to care; stores were even still open.”
At the Centro Coro hotel, where Striegl was staying, she noticed that the the owner had hammered planks across the windows. But still, Striegl wasn’t afraid. “I didn’t feel nervous because no one else seemed nervous.”
Then, the electricity went out. Luckily, the owner of the hotel had a generator with a light. That night, he kept his staff on and invited his friends and family to inhabit the unoccupied rooms. Together with Striegl, they ate a big dinner of fish and rice. For her part, Striegl provided some entertainment by astonishing her company with tales of freezing Canadian temperatures.
“They couldn’t believe it could be 5 degrees here!” she said. “Every day in the Philippines is about 30 degrees plus!”
At about 9 pm, Striegl headed to her room, which was located upstairs and had an outside walk-up. For the next hour she endured the worst of the storm there alone, attempting to read a book and spending regular intervals inching the door open to see what was going on.
“The winds were howling,” she said. “Every time I opened the door, I saw something new. One time there were flip flops – one pink, one black. Another time, I saw that the hotel banner from the top of the roof was whipping around the balcony. Because it was nighttime, you could just hear the storm and not see what was happening outside, which was scary. It felt like the building was shaking. I could hear pieces of debris banging into the doors and walls outside. There were about 30 minutes where I was pretty freaked out.”
In the end, she got out her ear plugs and went to bed.
The next morning Striegl went outside. She saw leaves and pieces of metal everywhere, telephone lines on the ground and boats floating upside down in the harbour. The local farmers’ market had been ripped apart and one house had so much siding torn off it that she could see inside.
“Anything that wasn’t concrete was pretty much missing pieces,” she reported.
However, what she noticed most was the resilient attitude of the people, she said.
“The funny thing is the people seemed to be happy. They were still smiling even though their houses and businesses were destroyed.” Striegl was so surprised at this that she even took a video of a man giving her the “thumbs up” amid the devastation.
Striegl spent one day helping dole out family meals of rice and sauce for a relief camp.
For the next few days she stayed at the hotel without electricity, eating at restaurants whose menus were becoming shorter and shorter as they ran out of food, and washing with water from a bucket the owner of the hotel brought to her.
The water ran out on Sunday. The next bucket the owner brought her smelled like sewage. “That was my tipping point,” she admitted. Striegl felt an urgent need to come home.
On Tuesday, after two days of waiting with more than 200 people to catch a standby flight to Manila, she began the journey back to Canada. “As soon as I got on the airplane, I was happy. Everyone was so happy about the air conditioning.”
She spent the next 24 hours making the trip from Manila to Tokyo, Minneapolis and finally, Toronto, where her boyfriend was waiting at the airport to drive her home.
Striegl, who felt relief upon landing in Canada, says she learned a lot from the experience. “I didn’t really realize how people lived in other countries. I’m happy to have what we have here. I saw how it took longer for the Filipino people to recover and function than it would do here in Canada.”