1) Though was able to walk some 10 kilometers just to get home, that kind of walking-running isn’t exercise nor leisure, it was torture and i was physically useless for days. ( i swear I am not walking ever if it gets more than 1 km!)

2) There’s nothing more miserable than spending a stormy night with strangers ( however friendly) under a roof whose owner you don’t know or haven’t even met.

3) Most people like their coffee a lot sweeter than I do.

4) If you’ve spent the night standing wet and cold to your bones, you wouldn’t ever mind little raindrops on your head.

5) Three MMS phones are bright enough to serve as flashlights.

6) Still I don’t understand why most houses in rural Bicol are surrounded by trees (coconut, pili, mango, jackfruit, acacia, narra, tagbon, atipolo, bilwang, etc.) I appreciate the shade and the fresh air, but it’s horrible when they fall on your roof during typhoons.(From now on, we are cutting down anything that stands within 5 meters of our house!) In addiiton, never live on a bahay-kubo along seashores and near fish ponds. ( but what if that’s what most people got for sheltering options?)

7) Green mangoes on an empty stomach is like a week-long laxative, afterwhich your bottom and the toilet bowl’s lid will become best of friends.

8) There’s nothing sweeter than fresh buko juice the morning after a typhoon on a sad note that your next fresh buko (not to mention the copra for cash!) will not sprout in years to come. daig pa ang sinabunutan ang m ga puno ng niyog na nakatayo pa matapos daanan ni milenyo.

9) I wish I could still see through the eyes of a child so I won’t get angry at God for leaving people homeless, lifeless and hungry after big storms and typhoons, hurricanes and other natural calamities and disasters.

10) Sacks of cement + rain (as in ulan, not raine) = blocks of stone. What are we to do with those? Ahh..they can be inserted on the flooring!!

Though my stomach went crazy for days for drinking coffee (that tasted more like brown sugar than coffee) on water that just simmered (did not boil), I would always be grateful to the people of Brgy. Buhatan, Sorsogon for taking under their roofs the travellers (going home to Gubat, Barcelona and Prieto Diaz) that got stranded in their midst.

Salamatonon po.

Most of us only got as far as Buhatan when the road to Gubat was blocked already in Cabid-an due to acacia trees that went down as early as 3 pm that September 27.

Walking (read: running while looking up for flying tree branches and GI sheets that might break your neck) from Cabid-an to Buhatan (about 5 kms.) turned out to be a better option than spending the night cramped in a jeepney stucked in the middle of the road among raging winds, falling trees and flying GI sheets.

Buhatan to Payawin (my Brgy.) is another 5 kms that took almost 4 hours of walking over and under fallen trees that blocked the road. Only firefilies displaced from trees and our cellphones served as our flashlights when we started walking at 2 in the morning after Milenyo left.

Rebuild. Clean. Clear.

There’s nothing else to do than those.

Wireless internet connection should better penetrate Sorsogon by now. Otherwise, it will be 2007 before we get decently connected.