The long awaited PART 2 :)

Pasensya (Patience/sorry) everyone that I was unable to write part 2 last week, haha. So I'll try and get through as much as possible this week!

So here's the last paragraph of where I left off last week:

One sister dived underwater to unlock the front door, but the pressure from the water on both sides of the door sealed it shut. By this point, all the sisters were in the water. I think there was about 3-4ft of air left---I distinctly remember scanning the room to see how much air I had left. I was praying the whole time, but I remember praying that if not me, God would inspire someone else to find the way out. Many of the sisters were panicking at this point and I just had to breathe to stay calm.

To continue:

I backed away from the door towards the kitchen, on the other side of the house. My companion saw Sister Malietoa dive under our giant fridge which was floating and blocking the entryway into the kitchen and laundry area. My comp was yelling her name for a few minutes until we heard someone else yelling from that same direction---Sister Schaap, Sister Malietoa's comp. We gathered all the sisters over and made our way over to the kitchen and then down the long hallway of our laundry room. I was the first one to enter the laundry room. At the end of the room, I saw that Sister Malietoa and her companion Sister Schaap had found a way out! Sister Schaap had already gotten out and was helping her comp climb up.

Earlier in the storm, the wind had broken a hole in the wall of our laundry room. (The way our laundry room is built is kinda like a green house: there's a hard, plastic outside and then decorative wooden paneling inside to form the structure.) Sister Schaap had punched and kicked the wooden bars and made a hole big enough for us to climb up and out of. As I climbed up, more wooden bars broke off so it made the hole bigger for everyone behind me, haha. I could taste the water as it was gushing in and it was salty, so it was seawater! That's crazy that the ocean had come in so far. Tsunami! (Turns out, Tacloban city is the only place that really flooded since we had the storm surge and the eye wall.)

I later found out that when we couldn't open the front door, Sister Schaap remembered the hole the wind had made earlier in the laundry room. But when she got over to the door, it was still bolted shut with a metal bar. She managed to remove the bar and then open the door against the flood. She told me she felt people pushing with her. There's no way she could open the door by herself.

Once I climbed out, I was standing near the roof on what I think was a rain gutter. The water level outside was much higher than inside the apartment, so the water was kinda covering where I was standing. Once everyone was out, we walked along the rain gutter to a lower level of the roof, and unto a higher level. There were things to hold unto so I wasn't balancing or anything (which was good because my glasses were all fogged up and wet so I couldn't see much). We all sat on the roof, in the middle where there was a kinda smallish enclave of some sort. We huddled together for warmth and protection against the wind and the rain.

As I looked around us, I was blown away by what I saw. All the houses around us were just torn apart. There was a giant tree infront of our house that only had its trunk and a few large branches left. I could see metal pieces from roofs just bent in half. All the other trees and plants were gone. No green at all. I couldn't see much further because of the fog. I think by this point, in our area most of the debris had stopped flying around because it was covered in water. So we were incredibly blessed to not have anything hit us while we were exposed on the roof. The first thing we did was pray when we got to the roof. We begged that the waters would stop rising. With the rate the flood was rising, a few minutes or so more and we would have to search for higher ground. And the nearest structure higher than our building was across the street and down a few houses.

We all repeated Our Purpose as missionaries, Doctrine and Covenants Section 4, and the Standard of Truth to keep us calm and sane. After a few minutes, we checked the water level to see that it had not risen any more! I think after that we were able to relax slightly and then focus on how we were each doing. A few of the sisters had gone into shock. We gathered around them to keep them warm and awake. With the wind blowing, the rain still coming down strong, and being soaked, many of us were starting to shiver uncontrollably. We had no idea how long the storm would last. After a little while, we rearranged so that we were all laying down, hugging our companions and back to back with the next companionship, as close as we could. I think we laid there for at least two hours. We would occasionally check the water level and our surroundings for signs of any change.


That's it for this week. To be continued! Yet again! I'll probably take a couple weeks. . . so much happened.

Sister Amanda Smith