High and dry

Except for a small puddle of water at the foot of my bed, I thought that last Saturday was going to be like any other rainy Saturday. I piled old newspapers on the floor and put a pail under the part of the ceiling that was leaking. Manoy Boni, the handyman who I call on to fix things around the house, had returned to his home province to care for his ailing mother. I'm wary of hiring someone else to do the job because on the previous occasions I did, Manoy Boni had to redo the work.

From Quezon City, I was going to the Salcedo Market in Makati to buy kefir and sapin-sapin. My favorite vendor sells sapin-sapin the size of a saucer. On days I go to the market, I visit Tommy's, a stall that sells Batangas coffee with condensed milk. The food choices at the market can get so overwhelming that I usually end up picking the usual-chocolate croissant or baked chicken empanada. The market's organizers have set up more tables under the trees and it is always a treat to have breakfast amidst the rustling of the leaves.

It was still raining by the time I got to Makati. I was nursing a cold and thought that getting soaked was not going to help me get any better. I went inside a coffee shop across the market and thought that I'd wait for the rain to stop before doing my shopping. When I looked outside after a few minutes, I realized that I needed to walk across ankle-deep water to get to the market. I saw vendors and customers huddled under the tents. Umbrellas were being blown away. The merchandise was soaked and some vendors chose to pack up and leave.

My husband and I attempted to go back to Quezon City but Buendia Avenue was flooded and we could not get to EDSA. After a few tense minutes in deeply flooded streets, we ended up in a mall, which looked like it was built on higher ground. Rain-drenched people started streaming inside. Near a window on the third floor, people converged to look at the Pasig River overflow and to watch vehicles make U-turns because waist-deep water on the road beside the river made it impossible even for big trucks to pass.

We sat in a coffee shop with free Internet, checked the news sites, and realized that it was impossible to go home that day. One of the earliest videos uploaded showed a van being washed away by floods in a street near our house. I started getting calls and text messages from family and friends asking if we were okay. I called a neighbor and she told me that it was impossible to get inside our subdivision as the roads outside the gates were flooded. There was also no water but otherwise, everything was fine. I wondered if the pail I left had overflowed and if my house had become an aquarium.

We walked around the mall and window-shopped, a bit worried but grateful to be dry and safe. In the stores, we could hear employees and store supervisors discuss if it was best to stay in the mall or to try to go home. News that most of Metro Manila was flooded and that traffic in major roads had stalled was coming in. At that time, no one knew just how bad things would get.

"It's global warming," we heard one of the employees say. No one bothered to disagree with him.

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