Meeting Shella

The concrete building foundation in the background is where
Shella's house stood before Yolanda.
© 2014 Andrea Rip

I met Shella at the end of my time in the Philippines. Our All Hands Base moved from the Tugbong Municipal Hospital to a large private home a little closer to the town of Kananga. Shella was living across the street. She observed as we prepared the house the first day; tearing down water damaged ceiling panels and putting up new plywood ceilings, cleaning the floors, and moving furniture around. She and her father came over to help us interpret with the previous tenants and her father offered a piece of his land for some tents.

With Shella at the new All Hands Volunteers base in Kananga.
© 2014 Andrea Rip

Shella pulled me over to the window in the living room of the new house and pointed through the window toward a slab of concrete with a small number of cement blocks placed on it and some new rebar sticking out of the corners. "That was my house." She began to tell me her Typhoon Yolanda story.

Shella and her two children huddled in the comfort room (bathroom) in her house when the winds picked up and while it howled and screamed around them. Never so scared in her life, she heard the entire house eventually crash around her. Her parents who live across the way, looked toward her home when the winds started subsiding and thought that she and her kids had died in the house. All they could see was a collapsed home that appeared unsurvivable.

When the wind totally let up, she was able to get up out of the bathroom with her children and walk outside towards her parents home. As you can imagine their family praised God and expressed enormous relief that they walked out alive.

Shella now lives with her parents until there is resources available to rebuild her house. Her two children are with her as well as a cousin's family. Her husband was able to break away from his job on another island for just one day to make sure she was okay right after Yolanda blew through.

Next door to Shella's family home was another house that blew apart. The people who lived there were renting the home and they talked to the owners of the home about rebuilding. However, the government will not allow a home to built in that location again. So, Shella's father gave them part of his land to put up a house. Their house right now is plywood with a tin roof. Everyone knows of people who were not so fortunate to have their lives spared or to find shelter so easily with family or friends. In light of this, it impresses me that Shella's family including her father is showing impressive grace and mercy to those whose homes were not spared - when it would be so easy to victimize his family and his community. He is even willing to give up some of his property to a wily group of All Hands Volunteer's tents while they contribute to the relief work in Kananga. He epitomizing what community should be!

I did not spend a lot of time with Shella, but I had a wonderful connection with her. We shared glassy eyes when she told her difficult story and a common faith in God and His goodness to her despite the loss of her home. I did not know what to say while she was telling me what happened, there were a lot of silence while she formed her sentences and reiterated what happened, and at the end all I could really do was put my hand on her shoulder and say "I'm glad that you are alive today to tell your story to me. God has taken care of you."

Shella's story is now part of my Philippines story and I am so happy that she entrusted me with her typhoon experience. She was one Filipino person who I was sorry to leave behind with a hug and a photo when I departed Kananga.