|  | Hi Everyone, It’s been over a month now since we were hit by the super typhoon Odette (aka RAI) and I can look back without being emotional and without a shedding a single tear. When morning broke, we felt the immediate relief that the typhoon was finally passed over. We were just so grateful to be alive. “Phew..that was definitely a close call!” I stared at the ocean, the same sea that gave me peace and tranquility daily. The same waves that had lulled me to sleep every night had shown another side. The sea could be angry, violent, and she was fully capable of swallowing you alive or shredding things to pieces.
I felt the force of mother nature viscerally. When the tides subsided, I saw fishermen walking on the shore looking for their boats that had been swept away. Their livelihood was washed away in the grueling storm as if they’d never been. Not only were their boats gone, but they had friends missing, those who’d gone out in the typhoon to rescue others or made last ditch efforts to save their boats. One boat captain died, another returned from the sea after spending much of the night hanging on to the roots of a mangrove tree for hours. Amazingly he’d swam from the nearby island of Badian where his boat capsized, 6 miles to the sea shore in Cebu! The survivors pulled from the sea were in shock and senseless; the next day after being caught at sea in the thick of the storm they couldn’t even remember their own names let alone report on what had happened!
At home I was scanning the destruction, the wrath the storm had incurred. Picking up the broken pieces, branches and metal debris scattered all around, I had a queasy feeling inside my tummy. |  | Mother nature had clearly been pissed-off and threw a major tantrum and I just wanted to get out of there!
The roads outside our house and indeed throughout most of the Southern part of our island were blocked with fallen trees, telephone poles, and debris. Unless you were on foot or had a scooter that could be carried when necessary, there was nowhere to go. But even on that first day I began hearing chain saws. People had already begun clearing trees from the houses and the road. It’s a testament to their tenacity and resilience! My first impulse was to get us moved to a safer place for fear that the second floor of our house might collapse on us at any time. The owner of the building adjacent to us was our landlord, so we moved into that property he owned without his permission. Fortunately, for us it was empty. We managed to move our belongings as quickly as possible with the help of neighbors who had also lost their roof and were desperate to earn money to rebuild. Luckily, we had cash on hand. The ATMs were all down and cash was suddenly king. Food became available in the days that followed but everything was ‘cash only’. So, had we had become squatters? I asked myself. Technically yes, but I’m were pretty sure, Guy our landlord, would have understood! After all it was an emergency!
A week or so later when the roads had cleared a bit, Guy, a 76 y/o French Expat and his wife made it down to us from the neighboring island of Camotes. The Philippines, has 7100 islands, mind you so travel via ferry is very common. He gave us permission to stay so we were no longer ‘technically squatting’. We’d been worried about it along with so much more. We even moved anything of his that was in danger of being destroyed like the stove, refrigerator, washing machine, and water heater.
|  | The first thing we did when we were in the new place was to make little fences so our tiny 7lbs dogs couldn’t run away. They usually are good at crawling through tiny forbidden places if they spot a hole, so we started securing the area. It’s weird when I think that our priorities were our dogs in the days that followed, while other people were still dealing with life and death issues like safe drinking water. Luckily, we had water, we even had enough reservoir in the pool for the toilets and at night we’d tapped water from the municipal line. People began coming to us for supply. It brought me to my childhood days when our family had a water tank and the rest of the neighbors lined up with their empty buckets to ask for water, but that’s a story for another day!
When we saw our neighbors, almost everyone kept on repeating the lines, “Our roof was blown away!”
Whose roof wasn’t blown away? I thought. I could sure relate; our neighborhood was hit hard.
“But we’re lucky to be alive, right?” by reminding them, I was affirming it for myself as well.
We met sharing tears and hugs, and everyone felt like us… grateful!
“We went to the evacuation center,” our part-time helper Emily told us, tears streaming down her face. “We slept next to the garbage cans; we could hardly sleep at all!” I doubt anyone had a good night sleep that night.
As the rain continues to drizzle after the storm, my office assistant Noreen stopped by. She’s a mother of 3, they also lost part of their ceiling, but she found a way to insert humor into her painful circumstances. She joked, “Oh, we just move our things from one side of the room to the other to minimize damage. What can we do?” Speaking to one very desperate neighbor we were offered deals blurting out, “Did you say, you wanted a cell phone for Christmas?” What did that mean? I wondered. “C’mon now. What use is a cell phone when we can’t even catch a signal and there’s no electricity to even charge it?” I asked. It was only later I discovered what they were talking about. Gaisano, the local mall’s glass doors were broken open by the storm and the place was looted. The security guard couldn’t do anything about it. People who were able to walk through the broken trees and electrical poles just went shopping for free! Cell phones and groceries were the most popular items. The mall remained closed for several days because even if they had had generators, it was very difficult for most people to pass through the debris filled roads. “You can live without food for several days, but you can’t live without water.” I remembered someone saying. “Ate, can we bath in your pool?” One neighbor asked after taking a dip in the ocean. “I don’t trust swimming at the ocean as it was filled with things.” Some came to simply bath even though the water was slowly turning green. We still had water in the pool, and people were already lining-up with buckets asking for water to flush their toilets, or with baskets of laundry to be rinsed in the pool.
|  | Drinking water was a major problem. We had just got four-gallon bottles of water, one of which was stolen from our outdoors kitchen. We gave one away and the other two were finished by us and the workers within a couple of days. We had some water in the cistern, which is an outdoors tank where water for bathing and cleaning is reserved, but it wasn’t safe to drink. It needed to be filtered or boiled. After two days we borrowed our neighbor Rick’s water filter used for camping. We tried to filter the water ourselves. It either didn’t work or we’d gotten confused which water bottles were filtered and which weren’t. Either way we ended up having bad stomachs for several days.
When we were drinking our home filtered water, others could only purchase drinking water from the town mayor, which was allegedly being sold at a premium. After quite a flap from her perspective voters, and remembering that elections were just around the corner, she remembered that she was there to serve the people, and drinking water was made available for a more reasonable rate. Gas was also another problem. There was a mile long line to refill gas, and the cost went from about 50 pesos a liter to 168 pesos a liter! Consequently, public transportation fares tripled. “Really?” I questioned a trike driver. “Please understand, Ma’am,” He argued defensively. “It’s a very long line to fill the gas; we have to line up in the morning early for hours.” |  | In the aftermath of the storm, everyone was so busy just trying to survive, doing whatever they could to have a semblance of their previous existence. All the many things we all take for granted in life; clean water, a hot shower, food and drinking water I’d never seen as luxuries before. Internet connectivity was pretty nonexistent, but it didn’t stop people from standing on the shores or the pier or hiking to the mountaintop with their phones and trying to connect with the cell towers with the neighboring island of Negros. People lined the shores where there were rumored signals holding their cell phones in the air, they looked like concert goers demanding an encore! There would occasionally be messages trickling through the Smart tower on Negros, mostly over Facebook Messenger or What’s App. A week later a directional antenna was erected at Smooth Cafe which stabilized the signal. We began hearing about who was safe, still missing and the extent of the damage throughout Cebu and the neighboring islands. Anyway, we were able to move to the adjacent island of Negros Oriental; the second time we moved everything we owned in 30 days! We were just being proactive in our pursuit of normalcy. I still work online and would have lost employment had we not moved. |  |
Like everyone else, we were desperate for a signal. More importantly, those of who left were able to tell the world about our situations. Some of us received financial help and tried to pay it forward. Most people I know have returned to help others who were still stuck or left behind.
We also raised funds to help “rebuild and recover Cebu” and my community reaching out to others. Thank you everyone for your generous donations. You know who you are. In the spirit of transparency, your funds were disbursed to the following people and organizations: |  | 1. Healthy U, our favorite vegetarian restaurant in Cebu City, run by our favorite Yogi Amitabha whose mission in life is to promote health and wellness in the community. The restaurant was destroyed during the typhoon. They also sponsor a monthly college student’s education, so we wanted that to continue uninterrupted as well as repairs. |  | 2. A special mention to Simon and Angie Briggs from https://www.moalboalecolodge.com/
Although their resort was ravaged by the storm, I admire their indomitable spirit because they tirelessly have helped local people rebuild their homes. They continue to organize to provide roofs for locals and help them build them.
Former Stroud resident tells of scary experience of Super Typhoon in Philippines | Stroud News and Journal
|  | 3. Also, Dyna and JP from Freediving Planet Moalboal for organizing seashore cleanup drives, to restore the coast in Moalboal. They are a couple of most accomplished free-divers and restauranters we know. They have done so much to help those in Moalboal in these last several weeks… really for years!
|  | 4. Helping a good friend Bambi Beltran, a well-known screenwriter, poet, and actress of local independent Visayan films as well as a recipient of one of 17 laureates of the 2020 Deutsche Welle (DW) Freedom of Speech Award. Her relief efforts Dispensilya Sugbo's 2nd relief operation running in Olango Island! |  |
‘I pray that help comes’: Olango Island still waiting for aid a month after Odette (rappler.com)
5. We also chipped in to rebuild our favorite dog shelter which is being organized by Linda, Irwin and Lauriane from MoalBoal Dog Rescue. This has been an ongoing passion of ours because the doggies can’t help themselves! <grin>
|  | 6. Last but not least, we also help individuals directly who needed it most and other local organizations who we witnessed poured their heart, body and soul into rebuilding the community. We definitely could still use some help, kindly visit us here. Rebuild and Recover Cebu | Ming's World (Powered by Donorbox)
$1 can buy 1kg of rice
$5 can buy 10 gallons of drinking water
$25 can feed a family for 5 days
$75 can put a roof over their head
Note: Some videos were taken off YouTube because in the chaos of what happened, I had no time to document the events, nevertheless, we all went through the same thing throughout the island. | | I love and support Indie Authors |  | This week, I am featuring an inspirational woman, Shirley Read-Jahn, who has led a most colorful life indeed. She was born to an English rose and a German-British spy father, educated in England, coming of age in London’s legendary sixties, before becoming a cave-dwelling hippy on the Greek island of Crete.
Shirley takes us to exotic places where she lived and loved.
Excerpts from Dancing through life, Volume 1, From the Back Cover 'Loaded with heavy backpacks, my sister, Pam, and I hit the road for four months. After a number of weeks traveling through Europe we arrived off the ferry from Athens into the port of Heraklion, Crete. In the youth hostel we asked the manager what we should see and where we should go. Waggling his finger, he solemnly intoned, "Whatever you do, do NOT go to Matala. It's filled with sex and drugs and filthy hippies." So, we got on the next bus to Matala.' |  | 1. Tell me about yourself. I was born in England during World War II, but at 3 years old moved with my older sister and parents to live in Germany, after my father’s wartime spying job became redundant. As a British diplomat post-war in Germany, he was moved around meaning that I moved constantly throughout my life, attending 11 schools before I was nine years old, as we changed from one British Army school in Germany to another. When my mother had finally had enough, at 9, I was placed for 7 years into an English boarding school to get some much-need discipline. I went on to university, specialising in modern languages, eventually moving to Spain then Greece, where I spent one of the happiest times of my life living in an ancient Roman burial tomb in a cave in Matala, Crete.
I then travelled quite extensively, eventually marrying 4 times and living in different countries. All of this has made me strong, fascinated about the world, opened me up to so many experiences, and, people tell me, full of joie de vivre, hence the title of my memoir, Dancing Through Life. I’ve done so many different types of work from landscape design, interpreter work, paralegal work, political volunteering, and co-founding the San Francisco Jazz Festival (SFJAZZ). I’ve danced in many middle eastern dance troupes, and met so many celebrities through the jazz world, circuses and theatre people I worked with, that the memoir comes in two separate volumes in order to tell a major part of my personal history. 2. Synopsis of your book (memoir) in one sentence. The life stories in both my memoirs are truly a dance: now joyful and leaping, now phoenix-like as I lift myself up from the ashes and reinvent myself, from covering my youth in an almost-Victorian English boarding school to the men, marriages, triumphs and misfortunes, the countries I’ve lived in, the fascinating entertainment performers I knew, and eventually how I became a writer. 3. Why did you write this book? Friends and family have repeatedly told me they love listening to my stories about my life and that I should write them down. I also wanted to leave a history of my life for my son and his children so they would know who their granny really was. 4. What message or lessons did you want your readers to take from this book? Grab life by the horns. Jump right in, go after what you want, try it all out. And awake each day with a smile on your face to offer someone else, to cheer them up. There are so many roles women can take on in their lives. I hope my memoirs reveal some of those different women’s roles they can place themselves in just from seeing what I have done, and that their men will appreciate what women can accomplish.
5. How many hours do you write in a day?
I get up very early to write. I have Parkinson’s Disease and other health issues and the mornings are when I function best. These days I write about two hours a day, sometimes more. It depends on how I’m feeling and all the other things I need to do, or enjoy doing, during these precious days left to me, being in my late seventies now. 6. Are you currently working on a book at the moment? Yes! I am currently writing two books. One is a travel memoir, the first in what I hope will be a series of travel memoirs, set in Australia where I now live. The second is very exciting to me. I inherited a genealogical tree put together by my great grandfather. It goes back to 1202 and lists what my ancestors did in their lives. His father, my great-great grandfather, was an intimate friend of Charles Dickens and it was Dickens who got my great grandfather his job in the first free library in England, in Manchester, where he worked all his life. It turns out that many of the maternal side of my family have been involved in writing, in libraries and running bookstores.
I’m putting together a biographical fiction book based on this history. I like to write a children’s book while producing one of my adult books. For example, when I was writing a biographical fiction called Hidden in Plain Sight, a British Military Agent’s Story, about my father who was a spy in World War II in the Soviet Union and England, I took time out to write and illustrate some of my children’s books. I followed the same process while writing my two memoirs. I’ll mention here that I’ve found illustrating my children’s books to be very good for me in that it demands hand-eye coordination, which helps regarding my Parkinson’s Disease.
I have published 7 kids’ books, 2 memoirs, and 1 biographical fiction book, all written since 2019, so I guess you’d call me somewhat prolific! I certainly find writing and drawing very soothing and a great distraction against any health woes I might be dealing with on a day-to-day basis. 7. If you are not writing, what are you doing when you are not writing? I’ve been a belly dancer for most of my adult life and fortunately am still able to teach. I also regularly play table tennis, do tai chi, and try to walk a little each day (the hardest part of Parkinson’s for me). I’ve learned that many people with Parkinson’s are still able to dance even when walking becomes difficult. Maybe I should play music while walking and dance my way along the street! Aside from that, I much enjoy spending time with my husband. We now lead a quieter life, gardening, reading, visiting family and friends when Covid allows, but we used to travel around Australia in Snowflake, our 1989 diesel camper van, hence the travel memoirs I’m starting to write. My husband also comes with me to markets in our local area where we set up our marquee and sell my books. It’s a super way to meet people and talk about books in general. 8. What would you advise emerging Indie authors? Just start. Go for it! Don’t worry about any of your writing being perfect. Editing comes later. Just let it pour out of you. If you want to write a timeline, and like to be organised, do that. If not, don’t even worry where you start. Even start at the end of your story then fill in the beginning and middle. Perhaps write in a stream of consciousness. Don’t worry about proper punctuation or syntax. Get your own thoughts and feelings out of you and onto paper. I happen to think it’s rather a good model to use when writing your first draft. As said, editing comes later. You’ll feel wonderful once you’ve started writing your story; the characters will become dear to you. It’s a wonderful escape. Also, I’d apply that modus operandi to living one’s life; I certainly have! Don’t wait for things to happen. YOU can make things happen. If you want to marry, for example, don’t wait for your prince to ride up on a white horse and sweep you away. Look for him, find him, and lasso him!
9. What are you reading right now?
I always have two or three books on the go at one time, flipping from one to another. Occasionally, I get totally immersed in one only and read it from cover to cover often in one sitting. I much enjoy reading various authors’ memoirs on the friendliest site online called We Love Memoirs. I’m currently reading one of Beth Haslam’s memoirs. She always brightens my day by making me laugh from the way she can turn any situation into something funny. I’m also reading books on how to market one’s books, plus books written about my great grandfather, culling information for the next book I’m writing.
10. If you were a fruit or a vegetable, what would you want to be and why?
I’d be a star fruit. Throughout my long life I have always felt humbly special, optimistically certain that a bright star shines over me bringing me luck. We all have our trials and tribulations, but I’m grateful for my own guardian star above me, knowing it will always ensure I come out alright in the end, and it’s that knowledge that lets me get up each day with a smile.
Check out more of my author interviews here. | Don’t forget your reviews! |  | If you love a book, please leave a review.
It is your gift to the Author. |  | My 5 star review for “Dancing Through Life” posted at Amazon and Goodreads.
Dancing Through Life Volume 1 A Memoir by Shirley Read-Jahn
I really enjoyed Dancing Through Life, Volume 1: A Memoir by Shirley Read-Jahn. First of all, I love the cover. It depicts fun, joy and abandon; it’s totally appropriate for the book. Shirley has led a richly interesting life as she danced away her path through the highs and the lows. Hailing from England, the daughter of an English-German spy, raised in one of the finest boarding schools in England, she shuttled back and forth between Germany and England. After college, she traveled extensively with her sister in Europe, embracing the hippy culture of the 60’s and living with other young nomads in the Matala Caves of Crete that also housed Joni Mitchell and other famous artists. Shirley immigrated to the US, where she took up a variety of colorful careers, including swimwear model, interpreter, landscape gardener, paralegal and event’s organizer. She was the co-founder of the highly successful SF Jazz Festival! Shirley definitely led a fascinating and inspiring life that most of us can only dream about; along the way she’s met a cast of interesting characters and celebrities. This book is a fabulous compelling read; Shirley weaves her story in such a way as to entertain us with her wit, charm and her fresh positive outlook; she always leaves her audience hungry for more. Each facet of her being reflects the phases of the life of every woman, something we can share and internalize as our own. I can’t wait to read Volume 2 and discover more with every stone she overturns.
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