MANILA, Philippines — The water was rising fast.
In the darkness of early morning, Amanda Smith moved away from the window
to shield her face from the slashing rain. She had shut it just moments before
to ward off the raging storm whipping through the palm trees outside.
But now the wind had ripped it open, and the wooden shutters were slamming
violently against the wall again and again. Sister Smith, an LDS missionary
from Elk Ridge, Utah, couldn’t see anything outside, but she
could smell the sea, which seemed to be getting closer and closer. They had to
get out of here.
She had heard about the storm three days before, from a driver of a
pedicab. It was typhoon season, and tropical storms were common in the Philippines.
Still, the last storm warning had produced nothing but blue skies. Some of the
missionaries wondered if this time would be any different.
There were nine missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints with her in the house, a two-story structure made of cement blocks. They
were young women from Utah and Alaska and the Philippines, all about her own age,
19. They had done what they could to prepare, hastily assembling 72-hour kits,
and had even bought candles and rope, just like their mission president had
asked, even though no one in the house thought either would be necessary.
Now, as water roared down the streets toward them, Sister Smith realized no
preparations were too small. The worst storm in generations had just hit
landfall.
Bracing for the worst
More than 300 miles to the north, in an apartment in the capital of Manila, Elder Ian S.
Ardern sat watching CNN. A former mission president with salt and pepper hair
and an easy smile, he couldn’t help but feel a looming sense of dread about
what was unfolding. On the screen, the typhoon churned, a monster on a path no
one could stop. Winds would eventually reach 200 miles per hour.
As first counselor in the Philippine Area Presidency, Elder Ardern worried
directly about the 675,000 LDS Church members living in the Philippines,
particularly the thousands living in the eye of the storm in and around a city
of 235,000 called Tacloban, as well as the entire population.
A native of New Zealand,
he had seen his fair share of typhoons, and knew firsthand their destructive
power. He hoped the members, and the young missionaries, had heeded the call to
prepare.
Days before the storm hit, his office had been sending out warnings to the
21 mission presidents in the Philippines,
with maps regularly updating and charting the course of the typhoon. Prepare
emergency kits, they had advised. And get to a safe place, which for many
members meant a chapel.
The area presidency had asked each of the mission presidents to call in
when the storm subsided to report damages and the status of their missionaries.
Elder Ardern watched the news as the sun began to rise over the Philippines and
waited for the first phone call to come in. He braced for the worst.
Rising panic
Sister Smith had always wanted to be a missionary, ever since she was a
little girl growing up in Minnesota, toting her scriptures to Primary, learning
to play hymns like “I am a Child of God” on the piano. She’d put in her mission
papers as soon as she turned 19.
She had been excited to go to the Philippines. But in some ways, she
seemed too delicate for this place, with her long, willowy build and fine
porcelain skin. The Philippines
wasn’t exactly clean, and some things had taken getting used to — rice for
every meal, the choking smell of exhaust on the clogged streets, cold showers from
a bucket. But she had also fallen in love with the place — the sweet smell of
mangos, the effervescence of the people, the way the language of Waray-Waray
had started to roll off the tongue.
One day she sat down on a stool to teach a lesson in a dirt-floor shack and
out of nowhere three fuzzy chicks materialized and walked around her legs, the
way birds landed on Cinderella’s shoulder, and she thought: What is this
magical place?
She had been out five months, her latest area called San Jose, where some of
Tacloban’s richest and poorest residents live, some in nice apartments, others
in shacks of bamboo and cardboard, a tarp stained by the smoke of cooking fires
the only thing passing for a roof, roosters and stray dogs running at their
feet.
San Jose sits right on the sea, and so a few days before the storm, just to
be safe, the mission president’s assistants (two young men, elders who help the
president) asked her and her companion to come farther inland, which is where
she was now, with nine other sister missionaries, in a house quickly filling
with a black, mucky water.
As the storm worsened, she could feel the house shaking, metal poles
outside snapping, animals howling and squealing.
At first, the sisters had all gathered in one central room on the second
floor, thinking it the safest place in the house. But the water was now rising
to their knees. Metal bars covered every window, preventing an escape outside.
With no other choice they would have to go to the first floor, where the water
nearly reached the ceiling, and try to open the front door to get out.
They knew the current could pull them out into the ocean, but if they
stayed where they were now, they would drown in what had essentially become a
box of cement walls.
One by one the sisters slipped into the freezing water on the first floor.
A few couldn’t swim; they held tight to their companions. Some of the women
started to cry.
Sister Smith was scared too, but she was determined not to let it show. She
wanted to stay calm for the others.
The front door was locked with a metal latch on the bottom and the top. One
of the sisters dived under the water and unlocked the bottom latch; another
reached the top and did the same. But when they tried to open the door it
wouldn’t budge. The water pressing from the outside and inside had sealed it
shut.
What had been ebbing as a low level panic reached hysteria for some of the
sisters, who began weeping and sobbing. Sister Smith could feel the panic
rising in her chest too, but she had to stay calm. With a few of the other
sisters who had become leaders of the group, she started to sing hymns, their
voices muted by the stinky water rising to their chins. They quoted scripture.
They prayed. Sister Smith put on a brave face, not daring to say aloud what she
was thinking:
“I never thought this is where my life would end.”
Finding survivors
As the storm subsided, the phone in Elder Ardern’s office started to ring.
One by one, the presidents of the 21 missions in the Philippines called in, reporting
that all their missionaries were safe and accounted for. Except for one. The
president from the Tacloban mission never called.
As Elder Ardern waited, the phone rang. Parents from Idaho
and Texas
called in, frantic for news of their children. The wives of the area presidency
took most of the calls, assuring parents that as soon as they had word they’d
let them know the status of their missionary children.
More than 24 hours passed and the area presidency still hadn’t heard any
word on the status of the 204 Tacloban missionaries. Elder Ardern was pacing
when an email finally came in from the mission president. The 38 missionaries
in the city of Tacloban
were safe. He had negotiated with local government officials to send an email
on the only functioning Internet portal in town. As soon as he found the rest
of his missionaries he’d be in touch, he promised
Cell service was still impossible, and would be for days, if not weeks.
Elder Ardern was relieved, but also worried about the rest of the mission.
The area presidency dispatched every church employee in Cebu and Manila — security and
building maintenance and church welfare and others — to go to Tacloban to
search for members. They would travel the six hours from Cebu to Tacloban to
count survivors, return to Cebu to find a working phone or Internet connection
to make a report to church headquarters in Manila, and then head back out in to
the wreckage to find more survivors and help.
In one Mormon congregation alone, 95 percent of the members saw their homes
destroyed. Scores had lost family members, many carried out to sea with the
current, never to return.
Praying for a miracle
The sister missionaries worked together. Sister Schaap punched a hole
through an opening in a flimsy wall, and the group of 10 swam through the murky
water that would soon carry their journals and clothes and pots and pans out to
sea. Those who couldn’t swim clung tightly to their companions.
The sisters used the rope to reach a nearby roof. Sister Smith stood on the
rain gutter, the other nine sister missionaries shivering beside her, the rain
still coming down in sheets. Hours had passed since the beginning of the storm,
and yet the sky above Tacloban was still gray, shrouded by fog.
Sister Smith said thoughts of dying left her mind. But some of the sisters
appeared pale and their bodies were shaking. The water was still rising and
they feared it would engulf them.
One of the sisters suggested they pray. They huddled closely together,
bowed their heads, and with the rain dripping down their chins, asked God to
make the water stop. And then, in what Sister Smith could only describe as the
greatest miracle of her life, the sea stopped rising.
Rescue
By the time Elder Ardern arrived in Tacloban four days after the storm, the
water had receded, leaving a putrid scene of destruction in its wake. Bloated
bodies lay exposed on the sides of the road, some covered by a blanket, or
rusty corrugated roofing, others by a moldy piece of cardboard. The stench was
sickening.
At one point, the city had tried to conduct a mass burial for 200, but had
turned its trucks around when they heard gunfire.
The city had descended into chaos and lawlessness. Survivors of the typhoon
had broken into stores that hadn’t been flattened to steal televisions and
toys, food, even light fixtures, despite the fact that there was no
electricity.
Hours after the storm, the president’s two assistants had made the walk
from the mission home to the house where the sisters had been staying. The
house was destroyed but they had to kick through the door to get inside. When
they found no one, they feared the worse, a sense that only heightened when a
neighbor told them they’d seen four sisters leaving for a nearby elementary
school.
“There were supposed to be 10,” one of the elders said.
They found all 10 at a nearby elementary school, and soon learned the story
of the escape from the house and the hours spent on the roof, praying for
someone to find them.
With the sisters now accounted for, the assistants and other missionaries
assigned to the mission office fanned out through the city, trying to find the
rest of their mission force. A dense cloud cover prevented even satellite
phones from working, meaning the missionaries had no way to communicate with
missionaries serving in outlying areas.
But these missionaries, they said guided by the spirit and survival
instincts, made their way to the mission home. Some walked for four hours.
Others hitched a ride on a motorcycle, relying on the kindness of strangers
unsure how to feed their own children. One group of missionaries cobbled
together more than a thousand dollars and made their way to Tacloban by boat.
All 204 missionaries were now accounted for.
The two assistants to the president, one from Dallas and the other from Fiji, stayed
with the 10 sisters and others at the mission home, supporting each other,
especially at night when gunshots rang out.
With their own food running low, the assistants, under the direction of
their mission president, decided they had to make their way to the airport. So
before dawn, four days after the storm but again in pouring rain, they headed
out with their flashlights pointing the way through the darkness.
“It was the hardest thing,” said one of the assistants. “People had gotten
so hungry they had begun to attack each other. The worst part was the smell,
the stench of death.”
Some sisters, their feet blistered, could barely walk. The looting had
become more severe, and the missionaries had heard rumors that prisoners at the
jail, which had lost its electricity and its guards, had simply walked out. The
assistants stood at the front and back of the long line of missionaries —
dozens and dozens — as they made the long march to the airport.
As they walked, Elder Ardern tried to arrange a flight out. He had booked
flights in Manila,
but thousands of other survivors had mobbed the Tacloban airport. The ticket
agent told him if he wanted a flight out, he’d have to pay more to get his 204
missionaries to safety.
As Elder Ardern tried other options, the missionaries milled about what was
left of the airport terminal, its walls blasted out by the gale force winds of
the storm. And then, a final miracle.
An Army sergeant with a C-130 airplane, assigned by the U.S. government
to fly Americans out of the disaster area, said he had a feeling he should walk
through the terminal one more time. As he did, he saw out of the corner of his
eye what looked like the nametag of a Mormon missionary. The sergeant, a Mormon
himself, asked if the missionary was American. When he said he was, the sergeant
told him he could arrange flights out for all the Americans and foreigners in
his C-130.
Before the day had ended, many of the missionaries Elder Ardern had come
for were flying out of Tacloban. By week’s end, all of the missionaries in the
area would be evacuated to Manila, where they
would await a new assignment in other missions in the Philippines.
The Road Ahead
It’s a Saturday afternoon in Manila,
a week after the storm, the air hot and sticky. Sister Amanda Smith and the
nine other survivors are sitting on a bench on the well-manicured grounds of
the Philippine Missionary Training Center, talking to a television crew from New York. Their story of
survival and resistance will inspire millions, they are told.
Still, it is hard for most of them to talk about their experience, and the
things they saw. They said night terrors awake them. And so, just as they did
during the storm, they sing hymns and say quiet prayers, hoping for peace, and
an ability to leave behind the terror of what they witnessed.
And yet, there is a part of them that wishes they could go back, to help
those members and non-members alike, who are still stuck. They are comforted to
know that the church has never stopped searching for those that are lost, and
that in the coming weeks church officials, from Salt Lake and throughout the
Philippines, will continue to push food and medical supplies, blankets and
tents, into the areas most affected by the typhoon, to provide relief to
Filipinos, whether they are Mormons or not, part of a rescue operation that
includes dozens of non-governmental organziations (NGO's), faith groups and
governments from around the world.
When the interview with the TV crew is over, Sister Smith and the other
sisters hurry to a parking lot, where the missionaries evacuated from Tacloban
are boarding vans that will take them to their new area. They hug and cry,
bonded by a tragedy they never saw coming, but one they were surprisingly
prepared for.
For many, their missions are just beginning.
“It was such a terrible thing we witnessed,” Sister Smith said. “But I
learned so much about how people will come together to help others, expecting
nothing in return. I saw that from other missionaries, and I saw that from the
Philippine people. It’s a lesson I hope I never forget.”
