The wind and rains of Tropical Storm Mindulle have been replaced by a storm of statistics; 26 dead, 13 others missing, half a million households left without electricity or running water, NT$8.4 billion in agricultural damage.
If the reports lack a face, visit Tongshih Elementary School in Taichung County. You'll see 132 faces.
The school's gymnasium is currently the home of the entire village of Sanchakeng (
PHOTO: DAVID MOMPHARD, TAIPEI TIMES
Home away from home
The floor of the gymnasium has been sectioned off using folding chairs -- one section per family -- and tiled with the colorful foam squares found in kindergartens. A depot of donated goods is piled at the side in boxes. The scene looks like a living board game. Make your way around the chairs and collect a box of bottled water to put in your square.
The bottled water, cookies, chips, sweet breads, brooms and blankets are there courtesy of the local Lions Club. Earlier this week the club's members stood in front of their charity donations, posing in their orange vests and purple garrison caps for satellite news-gathering crews. For the villagers of Sanchakeng, having the cameras turned on someone else for a moment was as much a relief as the donated goods.
Lin Ming-chieh (
Tropical Storm Mindulle isn't the first disaster to befall the Lin family, or anyone else from Sanchakeng for that matter. During the 921 earthquake nearly five years ago, most of the town was destroyed -- all but a couple houses, according to Lin. The whole village slept in tents while the town was rebuilt. After that, Typhoon Toraji covered Sanchakeng with a blanket of mud, scrubbing the mountainside of vegetation that had taken root only a few seasons earlier.
Millions of NT dollars were invested in infrastructure meant to prevent future calamities caused by typhoons. Steep mountainsides were reinforced with sprawling steel and cement embankments. They were designed to withstand heavy rains, but last week Sanchakeng received nearly half of its average annual rainfall in just 36 hours. The soil saturated and many of the new embankments toppled.
"When you live in the mountains you get used to heavy rains and earthquakes," Lin said. "But these past years have been especially bad. If it weren't for government help, I'm not sure what we'd do. ... Move to the city to find work? The city isn't any safer than the mountains."
Time to clean up
The Sanchakeng Atayals are being put up in a town that has itself been ravaged by the recent rains. Families and shopkeepers in low-lying areas have spent the week dredging, sweeping and mopping their floors and piling ruined furniture into the street for trucks to take to local incinerators. A week of cleaning has begun to show results. Tongshih now surely has some of the whitest tile floors in Taiwan.
The owner of a shoestore was busy last Wednesday tossing perfectly good shoes into a large box on the sidewalk. "All the samples in the front of the store were ruined," she said. "These were their mates that were in boxes on the shelves. They're all size eight but they're all different. If anyone wants a pair of shoes that don't match they should come to Tongshih."
Elsewhere the work is heavier. Military trucks crisscross the town hauling fallen trees and foliage caked with redolent sludge. Helicopters shuttle back and forth overhead, ferrying supplies and soldiers into the mountains.
Some 14,000 military personnel have been assigned to help clean up and repair the hardest-hit areas.
Lin and several other men from Sanchakeng hop on board the helicopter each day and travel back to their village to help with the cleanup. It's an opportunity not only to play an active part but also to get out of the gymnasium, where temperatures have been reaching more than 40℃ during the day and not much cooler at night.
"The damage done to our homes and buildings in Sanchakeng isn't as bad as it was after 921," Lin said. "The buildings are still standing this time. But we've lost a lot of our crops."
He said that many of the fruit trees that are the village's staple crops have been uprooted, taking not just this year's harvest, but harvests for several years to come. Betel nut palms that served as a formidable cash crop have also been lost.
"Yes, planting betel nut is bad," Lin said, acknowledging that the palms destabilize the soil and lead to easy erosion during heavy rainfall. "But betel nut sells better than anything else we grow. If we don't plant it, we don't make ends meet."
Lin spoke of the shock he experienced when he first returned to the village last Tuesday to see that most of their crop of betel nut palms had slid downhill like dominoes and piled on top of buildings. One palm smashed through the window of a house.
"Maybe we deserved the bad luck," he said. "I don't even chew betel nut."
His biggest concern is the possibility of more rains that will bring even more soil sliding into Sanchakeng and undo the work they've done.
He returns to the gymnasium in the evenings and updates his wife on the progress being made. The conversation, he says, usually becomes a kind of planning session for the family -- how to make do with the resources they have and maybe make up for what they've lost. His wife can take a job in Kukuan that's been offered her, but it will mean being away from home half the month. Jeff will have to help take care of his grandmother. She had considered a similar offer after the 921 earthquake, but at that time Jeff was barely old enough to care for himself, let alone help care for his aging grandmother.
Lin worries that, with the roads into the village under repair for the next few months, it will take Jeff hours to walk home from school where it was previously a half-hour ride.
Right now Jeff's mind is far away from his potential new responsibilities.
For he and the other village kids, the week has been something like summer camp, albeit with parents chaperoning. They'll remember this as the time the army came to fly them into Taichung for the week.
"The helicopter ride was cool!" he said. "My grandma cried the whole time. I asked if I could go back with my dad to help, but they're only letting grownups go back. I want to ride in the helicopter again."
Having to stay in Tongshih has its perk, though. "This is a big school," he said. "They have lots of basketball courts and a track. Our school has only one basketball court."
In the afternoons, when the sun bears down, he and the others go for a pearl-milk tea at a store near the school -- another amenity not found in Sanchakeng.
A ray of hope
It's Thursday afternoon and it's sweltering. The only thing stirring inside the gymnasium are flies. Everyone else has taken cover under a tent outside where a sporadic breeze offers a measure of relief.
"The newspaper says that the KMT wants to give us blankets, one woman says. It's 40℃ in that gym, we don't need blankets. Fans would be nice."
Her comments are met with grumblings of agreement from several listless people.
Despite the temperature, the swelter is an unlikely relief from the rain that brought them to this gymnasium in the first place and indebted them to the kindness of the community. Already the mud lining the streets of Tongshih has dried and is being swept away. In their minds, the residents of Sanchakeng have started sweeping their own floors and tossing out ruined furniture, replanting orchards that Mindulle has ravaged and rebuilding wrecked roads and embankments.
But as the afternoon sun moves westward, shadows point east to a bank of dark clouds gathering over Sanchakeng. It will rain within the hour, heavily. Crews working in the mountains will be brought back to town and the villagers' hopes of going home soon will be soaked. They're going to be here for a while longer.
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