PIECE OF CABINET | PHILIPPINES

MARY MERGAL

Mary and her son hid inside the cabinet at the height of the Super Typhoon Haiyan storm surge. A decade later, they still endure reliving the trauma as more destructive typhoons devastate their locality because of climate change.

At the onslaught of Super Typhoon Haiyan, only Mary and her son remained behind her home.

Evacuation operations prioritized helping elders, and persons with disabilities. As it was about to be their turn to evacuate, the super typhoon suddenly struck fiercely.

They were trapped. She and her son who was four years old back then, were caught off guard when the storm surge waters quickly overflowed, leaving her with no other way to escape their flooded house. They felt hopeless, until they saw a wooden cabinet, and immediately hid there.

Object of Memory

For hours, they were trapped inside that cabinet, uncertain whether the water would seep through. They survived, but the destructive super typhoon has left them traumatized. In the first few years after the Haiyan, her son would shiver in fear whenever a strong typhoon came to their locality. A decade later, her son doesn’t tremble anymore, but the trauma still remains.

With the typhoons becoming more unpredictable because of a fossil-fuel-driven climate crisis, the chance of Mary not getting anxious that another typhoon as devastating as Haiyan might happen, seems to be close to impossible.