Bohol: The Buildup

Bohol is perhaps the most beautiful island that I’ve spent time on. A largely rural island, it is described as one of the Philippines “Rice Bowls” because of its large production of rice. For natural beauty, it really doesn’t get much better or diverse than Bohol. There are many resorts, and great diving, which is common on many islands, but there also fantastic beaches, scenic mountains, winding rivers, and rice terraces. The sites it is most famous for are the Chocolate Hills, which are coral formations from when Bohol was just a volcanic hunk of land. These hardened coral formations were gradually eroded until they turned into picturesque sloping hills, and, from both near and far, these steep hills covered with long grass look like little Hershey’s kisses. There are thousands of them in the interior of Bohol, and they are one of the biggest attractions in the Philippines. The other major draw is the sanctuary for the Tarsier,  a tiny animal somewhere between rodent and monkey that is nocturnal and has giant eyes and a miniscule body. They are “so cute”, and another popular attraction in the Philippines. Bohol is also one of the first places that the Spanish settled in the 16^th century, and one of the first agreements between the natives and the Spanish was signed in Bohol. Because of this, there are tons and tons of old Spanish cathedrals, even in the tiny little towns that dot the rural countryside.

In this rural and natural tropical paradise, the first of the two big autumn calamities occurred. In mid-October, I woke up early and got to work so I could ride with my co-workers to a town about an hour south of Manila for an event at a Catholic church which had some speeches from some Catholic big-wigs and a dramatic performance from my boss’s human rights theater group. On the way there, the radio in the van we were in was turned on, and turned really far up, and in between the Tagalog and typical radio special effects (“boyoyoyoyoing”, etc.), I heard the words “Bohol”, “earthquake”, and the number “7.2”. It was early in the morning, and my brain was moving pretty slowly, so I was trying to put it all together. I was also trying to think of what the Richter scale numbers were, as I gradually realized that an earthquake had hit the island that our group had visited just a month ago as we learned about the farming situation in the Philippines.

How bad was 7.2? What were the tsunami Richter scale numbers? What about the ones in California, like with the famous San Francisco earthquake in the early 1900s? How were our friends in Trinidad, San Vicente, the small group of farms in the north of the island? Did they feel it in Cebu, the second-largest city in the Philippines and cosmopolitan capital of the Visayas? Did my fellow YAVers in Duamguete feel it? My thoughts kept running through everything I knew about earthquakes, and the ones that had happened in western China and Turkey and places like that in the past decades.

I also wondered how frequent things like this were. The Philippines really is kind of located in a perfect storm area of the world. It’s super hot here all the time, but it also rains ferociously, which means floods are common, as are the typhoons which we now know can be particularly deadly. It’s the easternmost country in this area of the world, which means storms from the Pacific hit all over the eastern part of the islands. It is also right on the fault line of the Pacific tectonic plate, and is part of the Ring of Fire. Seismic activity is pretty common, as is volcanic. Many of the islands were formed by volcanic blasts, like in Hawaii, and there was a recent blast in the early 90s from Mount Pinatubo on Luzon which was not unlike the Mount St. Helens blast that ruined the Pacific Northwest in the US. There was also an earthquake of a similar Richter level in the early 90s, also near Bohol. Shoot, when I look at it like that, it seems that the Philippines really drew the short straw on things that weather and the earth can do to it.

Anyway, with this in the back of my mind, I took a trip from Manila back to Dumaguete the next week to celebrate my birthday with the YAV program. I of course asked them about whether they felt anything, and there were individual stories of their experience with it, which was apparently early in the morning. Some people were sleeping and were awakened by it, some were eating breakfast, some were out walking, but it was like 9/11 or JFK’s assassination in that everyone can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they felt it. Of course, Dumaguete and Negros Oriental was not affected badly, mostly just some tremblings, but it still freaked people out, and there were still surprising aftershocks.

I largely sat in silence and listened-I’ve never had to deal directly with anything like this, as Kentucky usually gets pretty “normal” weather. It’s never really too hot, or too cold, or too snowy or rainy or anything. I mean we have storms and things, but it seldom is anything that I can point to and say “Kentucky is really suffering”, because usually someplace else got whatever it is worse.

After my birthday, I went with Abby and Cobbie to a 100^th anniversary of the big UCCP (and originally Presbyterian) church in Cebu City, Bradford UCCP. We ate a huge barbecue meal; Cobbie and I ran a 5k at around 5 am the next morning (bad idea  after the barbeque) while Abby slept; we read the correspondence letter from 5^th Avenue Presbyterian in New York City, where the funding and the Bradfords had originally come from in the early 1900s; and we got to meet the mayor of Cebu and a senator, not to mention the honorary banquet with suckling pig. Cebu had been affected a little bit by the earthquake, as it is essentially right next to Bohol, separated by only a few miles of water. However, the damage was minimal, and had largely been fixed, whereas I learned that there were almost a hundred deaths in Bohol, and half the island had no houses left.

I also got a proposition that weekend by Cobbie and Dessa to do a Lebron and “take my talents to Tabilaran”. I thought that sounded great-I had had very little to do in Manila for the first month, and being in the big city alone was kind of bumming me out after spending the first month hopping around the Visayas, meeting new people, and hanging with my YAV girls, Cobbie, and Dessa. A chance to go to this rural and beautiful island, to get a chance to see a new place and meet new people, and to basically have a two-week personal mission trip sounded great to me. I had spent 3 weeks at a computer sending emails in an office-I wanted a chance to do some physical labor, get my hands dirty, and really feel like I was making a difference with every brick of rubble I cleared away and every new temporary structure I erected for the refugees. The reality was so different it would be an UNDERreaction to scoff and laugh at the naïve, ahead-of-himself YAV Duncan of late October.