Olga Came Through

She was called Tropical Storm Olga and she was very reminiscent of Noel. Despite the fact that they don’t typically tend to come “that late in the season,” nor to the regions I was in at the times, I experienced them both. Thankfully, there was very little damage to my site both times, but even less to my new site this time. There were no deaths near my town, no homes wrecked, no rivers overflowed too much, no trees came down to do too much damage to anything under.

Also thankfully, Peace Corps was a bit more prepared to act for Olga than they (or the rest of the country) were for Noel. On Tuesday, December 11th my emergency action person called my project partner’s house (the only working phone near me) to alert me that I was to get out of my site and go to Santiago to consolidate immediately. I’d missed the bus that leaves my site once a day so I started spreading the word that I needed ride out to the highway about a 1 hour ride, to catch a bus to the city. Everyone has my back here, and they seem to really enjoy helping me. My project partner’s husband got on it and got me a ride, even though no one wanted to leave for fear of bad roads and the impending danger of the storm.

I got to the city within 5 hours of being summoned to leave. Some people had a significantly shorter trip (also much cheaper. Mine ended up costing about $14 one way. I had friends who paid as little as $3 and $5 one way. If I’d caught that bus in the morning it would have cost $6. Sheesh.) But, with the exception of 2 friends of mine who are really isolated and without cell phone signal (or I guess landline either) pretty much every volunteer in the north of the country met up in a hotel in Santiago. Some people came using car, bus, truck, horse and/or mule, and one guy even got to tread through a river, raging since the water of the storm started.

We spent 2 nights in the hotel, mostly watching TV, but if you’ve already seen the pictures you’ll have seen that we did some other stuff too… I feel I should state for the record that all of those pictures are a lot more innocent than they look. No one really got too rowdy, though I know it looks quite the opposite. We’re just goofy. Not having a warm shower (or running water of any kind for some people) for a long time and then getting one for 2 days in a row will do that to a person.

We left after being told it was safe for most of us to leave by Peace Corps. My volunteer neighbor, who uses about 90% of the same road to get back as me was not cleared to go home, so I looked into it, and it turns out that the last 10% of the road that’s just hers was a mess. So she had to stay one more night at the hotel. I made it home safely, after spending a few hours figuring out how to get home. (Cell phone difficulties, compounded with having missed the one bus home from Santiago, compounded with not having brought my motorcycle helmet with me, compounded with other things made it difficult to figure it out.) But it all worked out in the end.
The word thus far is about 20 deaths in the country, all in the north, many a direct result of someone’s decision to open a levee to prevent a damn from overflowing or busting. When it was opened people who lived below and near it were not alerted in time to avoid its path. Look for video on the water flowing over it; it looks like Niagara Falls.