So much for our flooding...

On August 21, my long-time friend (and ex-boss!), Adele, came down for a visit. She came down to help with the typhoon relief, so Kris & I decided to help too.

So much for our complaints. We went to the village of Gaoshu (高樹), which means tall trees. It was only 33 km from us. Many of the tall trees were no longer existing. This village was not as badly hit as some, and a lot of clean-up had already been done, but people's houses were still a mess.

We went with two churches, meeting up with the pastor of a local village church, and split off to help 4 families. About 40 of us spent a whole day helping four families, and there was still so much work to be done. We wish we could go back, but it's a little difficult to leave Kaeden for a whole day as well. And despite how super he is, he's not yet ready for doing relief work!

Our group ended up helping a coconut farmer and his parents. The entire first floor of his house was covered in mud and about 3 feet of water. He had already done a lot of the work. For some reason, his house was built so that you had to step DOWN into the rooms of his house. So everything collected and we had to shovel water OUT of his house. Sometimes it felt like we were using a teaspoon.

This typhoon, named Morakot, was the most devastating one to hit the island in 60 years. Several farms, houses, and even complete villages were wiped off the face of the earth. One of the hardest hit villages, named Xiao Lin 小林, was quite near our village. That village was completely destroyed by the landslide which resulted from the typhoon. For excellent photos, go to this website.

To get a feel of how devastating this typhoon was, our nearby counties were hit in 1 to 3 days with as much rainfall as some rainy cities get in one year. Added to that is the already unstable mountains that have a lot of eroded soil. For example, Alishan (famous for its sunrise and forest train), which is about 2 hours drive north of us, received 2.7 meters (109 inches) of rain over 3 days. Pingtung County (about 40 min. drive south of us) received 1.4 meters (55 inches) in 24 hours. Compared to that would be these cities’ average ANNUAL rainfalls: London (0.6 meters) and Vancouver (1.1 meters).

We didn’t know it at the time, but the day of our arrival in Taiwan from Canada (August 8), was the hardest hit day of Typhoon Morakot. There's still lots of cleanup and rebuilding going on. I started this entry on September 9 and am just now finishing it on September 23. We've been blessed to have God's protection on us and just keep praying that we'll be able to help wherever and whenever we can.

We came home on Sunday at 3:30am, and discovered a flood in our apartment.

Luckily, the Chois had already moved all our furniture away from the gushing waters.

On Sunday, August 9, we lost electricity for the whole day,

but discovered the generators made the hall electric outlets work.

So there's our freezer - sitting outside our apartment.

Aftermath of Typhoon Morakot, the worst typhoon in 50 years.

Some of these concrete blocks tumbled over during the typhoon.

Poor banana trees.

Roof tiles from our building fell down.

Our poor trees.

The firetruck that came around the village to give us buckets of water!

Relief Work:

Our tools

Praying before splitting off.

Kris' shiny new black boots we got from the little hardware store in Dashe.

How we managed to buy them is a mystery since the man

who sold them to us could only speak and understand Taiwanese.

There's the shrine. The owner of the house was very intent on us

using the power washer, despite the amount of water and mud that

was already inside the house. The bad part was that there are steps up

to get out of the house, so the water couldn't just flow out. You can see

a line on the wall under the altar to see how high up the house was flooded.

The kitchen.

A glimpse of the back room where the father of the house had his tea. It was just covered in mud.

The back room where tea was normally drunk. We were trying to shovel mud to deposit outside.

Photo courtesy of Adele Booysen. The backroom with the

"bunkbed and wardrobe." The farmer still wanted

to save this stuff.

The owner was a coconut farmer, so he made us a jug of coconut juice.

A view of the side yard. The big pond is a result of flooding and overflow of the septic tank. Yummy.

A sunken vehicle. This is the house next door,

which held a kiln, I believe. The old man who owns

this place says he dries tobacco leaves here.

Photo courtesy of Adele Booysen.

This 78-year-old man had never seen a flood

in this village before.