One Week Post-Odette, Stil No Electricity

Today was the 7th day after Odette had visited the country, it's been a week already since the time we had experienced a super typhoon which I consider as well as the worst experience of a typhoon so far in my entire life.

So, a week after Odette, what has changed?

There has been no electricity, no water supply, no mobile signal, and at the same time, no internet connection for the past week here in our area. We are located in Guindulman, Bohol. This is not too far from the main town, it takes around ten to fifteen minutes of walking to reach our place from the highway. If one has a vehicle, it would only take three to five minutes.

It was understandable not having electricity as most electrical posts were down and water too because the water supply depends on the electricity but according to my mother, our town's water supplier has a generator which should work in times like this, however, it is not the case. But we found out on the third day that the water supply indeed works but due to our location being on a hilly spot of the town, water can't reach our home.

But the good thing is that our local church has a water supply so we would often source our water from there. We used to wash our clothes in the automatic washing machine but now, we have to go somewhere and wash them by hand. I just washed our clothes today and I got hand bruises. I also felt backache as I was scrubbing our clothes. I surely miss the convenience electricity had given us. But I am still thankful despite the back pain because I could wash our clothes.

As for cooking, we have to rely on our gas stove and wood. We still have a lot of gas when the storm happened so we got to cook rice and viand from there, and even heat water for our daily coffee needs, we have a hot and cold dispenser that is not being used right now. I just hope that there will still be enough supply of gas before we run out of it and hopefully, there are still stores that can refill that.

Unfortunately, we won't be cooking anything that might spoil especially for Christmas, we will skip our desserts, for now, we will only be cooking viands but my mother said we should cook Ube Halaya instead because she had been craving for it. Too bad we already bought ingredients for our desserts so I guess these can wait until electricity is activated again.

The worst part of this was that there are establishments which can't operate without electricity. This is true for water refilling stations, gas stations, ATMs, and more.

In our province and specifically in our town, people had panicked after a few days of no electricity. There's no way to withdraw cash, in our household, for example, we were already running out of cash on Monday which was the fourth day after the typhoon. While we still have gas on Saturday during Matti's vaccination day, our car was used to charge batteries at home which was why it ended up with only four bars of gas, we figured only one gas station is open in our town and there was a long line. The gas station was still closed and yet the customers were already in line.

That's when we decided to head to the city and seek some options. The city was also chaotic and I will share that in the next article.

Indeed, our lives had greatly relied on power. All these devices which had helped us with easing our lives are now unusable. They are now getting dusted, our airconditioner even is stuck with its cover open. My baby has been used to having air conditioning since birth and now, he had been having a hard time sleeping for the past week, we resort to fanning him manually, so both my husband and I have no good sleep at night as well. We keep our windows open and sometimes our doors too so we can get proper ventilation. And even sometimes we have to drive so to make the baby sleep as there's airconditioning inside the car.

However, my husband is unable to work, thankfully, his company had been very understanding, even offering their office to be a refuge camp. So we are considering going back to Cebu City if the situation won't become better come 2022 as he has to go back to work. That Sunday before Odette visited us, we just got hooked with PLDT fiber and our internet speed was pretty fast but that only lasted for four days. I am not sure when will this be restored though because most of the cables were cut together with the electrical posts.

My crypto hustles have been put as well to rest as well. I am not able to update my hive account until yesterday when we figured our internet connection is back but we have to insert it to a power bank. Both my husband and I are now being internet deprived, we both miss being able to get online, edit photos and videos, and post them online. Our laptops are out of batteries and it is not easy to find a place to charge them.

Generators are already out of stock in the province, we have ordered one from CITI hardware but they have not yet contacted us. Any generators being sold online right now are overpriced. We plan on renting one instead but it will be available next week.

Odette was truly a name that I won't forget. All these days, we had been dependent on electricity and the internet that after Odette left us with just the basic things, I realized that almost all of today's systems are powered by electricity, we had been very dependent on it and now that this one had been taken away, we have no other option but to adjust.

It is hard but we will surely surpass this storm.