It's almost a month now from when the cataclysmic typhoon traumatized everyone and wrecked almost everything in our place. Houses were scathed, emotions were shattered, and lives were lost. And here I am, like the most, healing from the trauma, and working on regaining the life I've almost completely lost.
It's also almost a month yet our electricity is not yet back, and water lines are not yet fixed. So, every night we always kind of have a romantic candlelight dinner and, almost every morning, we have to go kilometers away, persevere the long lines, to manually pump and fetch water from someone beautiful soul who up to now untiringly opens her door and offer us unlimited fresh drops for bathing and washing. These are our kind of normal now.
Anyways, we have to adapt to move on, as life is meant to be lived forward. And speaking of that, just last week, on the third of January, I had gone back to work, the regular reporting for work had resumed. I was glad that somehow life, my life continues, it gets back on the normal track it follows. It is bouncing back prettily.
It was 6:00 in the morning, I started to ready myself for my first workday of the year. After all my things at home, I left at 6:30 as at 7:00 I should be in school. So there, I arrived before the time, logged into our attendance sheet, and did my early school things. My workmates had arrived. For two weeks long we had not seen each other, so our first workday was filled with long vibrant conversations about how was everyone doing and how was "Odette" in each place, as expected. And yes, we all just shared the same sentiments.
After a while, we went on cleaning our workspace, checked the school's important documents and records, and headed on some other necessary tasks to accomplish within the time. At 10:00, we left for our original workstation in the Senior High School to check on our important stuff there, hoping that we could still retrieve them. It was just a few meters away from the Elementary School, our present and temporary workstation (for past half a year now after the government had decided to utilize the Senior and Junior High School as an isolation facility for those who're asymptomatically infected with COVID-19).
The rooms had been empty with COVID-19 positives for a couple of months already, so we were just allowed to get in, and do our necessary things there. However, the school was still so packed, and this time, with the huge number of typhoon Odette evacuees. Many of our students were there, left with no choice but to just shelter at school for they have nowhere to go home to for now. Odette had smashed their houses into pieces, making them literally homeless now.
As we were nearing the Senior High School building, I only had noticed the ceiling that was scathed, and thought that was all.
We went up to the last floor of the building, and there, the trace of Odette's wrath was clear - the roof was blown away, the grid ceiling gave up, and some of the laboratories equipment like Laptop, TV screen, glass cabinet were broken and shattered into pieces. The rooms were like years old storage rooms in total chaos.
It was such a saddening thing to witness on this first workday of the year. I don't know when can these rooms be able to accommodate the young learners again; I don't know when can these be packed again with the familiar faces we always personally greet "Good Morning" and "Good Afternoon" before; I don't know when can these be merrily noisy again with chitchats, childlike laughs, and more. There's so much to that school life, and I miss that this bad! I am just hoping that one day, things would get back to that normal we know, praying that it will be sooner than the soonest we all wished for it.
As of now, we are working on the pending tasks for our learners, and planning on the next things to do for the learning continuity.
I guess that would be all for now. Thank you so much for giving it some of your time. See you in the next one. Keep safe!
