How can you wash your hands when this happens to us?
Temoka Melindo (Moka) is a student at Glasgow Caledonian University and now lives in Scotland as a climate refugee. She tells her story and asks how we can sit around and watch this happen to families like hers and still do nothing.
One of the biggest things we tend to do is blame other people's problems on them. We don’t like to take responsibility, and we tend to blind ourselves from the effects of our actions. We have all done it, whether it’s blaming a mess on your sibling as a child or just sweeping the dust into the corner leaving it to someone else to clean up later.
But what has been a constant unresolved responsibility is our collective responsibility to keep our planet stable. This has been a blame game for too long, causing the effects of climate change to worsen.
“If these big corporations of manufacturing countries aren’t making a change, then why should I?”
“What difference does it make if I’m not getting affected directly?”
How can you keep up with this ignorance and blindness when everyone’s actions including yours have long term harsh effects on people? Do you not see what is happening in the world right now? Do you not care for those vulnerable people? You hide yourself from the truth and you don’t realise these things you see on the news effects people lives forever. What if it was you?
I am one of those people who have been a victim of the harsh challenges climate change creates. So, here is my story of the struggles me, my family, and a vast majority of people had to go through during a natural disaster.
I grew up in the Philippines on a small island called Siargao Island. This island was a thriving community where people relied on their natural environment for their economy and resources. It was a big surfing community that held local and international surfing competitions at our famous Cloud 9 surfing tower. We cared about the ocean environment the most with our biodiverse coral reefs and mangroves that were home to a variety of species.
I would snorkel at my favourite reef any chance I got growing up with my mum and my friends. There was a volunteer group known as S.E.A Movement Siargao that would host beach and street cleanups every Saturday that me and the local kids would go to. The community took responsibility for their actions and took care of what was important to them.
But then Typhoon Odette (a tropical cyclone) hit the island and changed the way the community lived.
The typhoon hit the island on December 16, 2021, when I was 15 years old. At this age I was finally making more friends and my small local school was making its roots stronger after years of improvement and finding the right teachers. That was later destroyed and has not been rebuilt since. I also lost ties with most of my friends after I was driven out the country to the UK.
A few days before the typhoon was due to hit our island, everyone did their usual drill for small category one typhoons as they were quite frequent during our winter rainy seasons. Me and my family moved all our bedding and important belongings to one of the safer more stable rooms in the house (mine) and boarded all our windows with plywood.
We then filled up big buckets of water in the bathrooms as the power usually goes out during and after a typhoon. My family was prepared, and we assumed it would just be like a normal tropical storm. Sadly, things escalated quickly and there was nothing we could have done to prevent what was to come.
The morning of the typhoon we checked our weather updates, and it turns out it was no longer a category one. It had rapidly grown to a category five (a super typhoon).
My mum’s friend was with us with his dog when we were at home and realised, we weren’t safe where we were. Quickly we packed the car with any valuables we could while the typhoon had begun and could sadly only fit one of our dogs. We tried our best to put the rest of our dogs and cats into the downstairs bathroom as it was the safest place in the house.
My family and our friend drove the car to our friend’s house on higher ground that was slightly less exposed to the strong winds. Then it was hours of getting buckets for the leakage and holding the barriers at the glass doors so it wouldn’t smash and hurt us. We could see debris flying around and trees falling. It was only a few hours, but it felt like an eternity.
Then the typhoon was finally over.
“I sat there crying for ages in the wreckage and broken pieces of my own home”
My mum was confident that the house had remained ok and probably only had minor damages. Some people came to our area and told us our house was not in good conditioned which worried me. My mum was sure they were exaggerating, so we stayed the night at our friends’ house and agreed to see the aftermath in the morning.
I snuck out that night because I was too worried and curious. I lost my shoes, so I walked barefoot through the debris and broken glass to check on the house and the pets. As I walked through the village, I saw people outside crying with their homes destroyed and people walked past me telling me to be prepared for what I was about to see. As I got closer to my home the worry grew, then I saw it.
My house was almost destroyed. The home I grew up in and made so many memories in was gone. The roof had blown off and ripped the rest of the house apart. I sat there crying for ages in the wreckage and broken pieces of my own home.
The next day me and my family went back to the house to try and salvage anything we could. After moving some of the worst of it from the second floor we saw the rest of our pets. Luckily, they all survived then, but unfortunately a few months later they died from the trauma as some wouldn’t eat or be motivated to do anything, and others ran away and were lost. These natural disasters don’t just have effects of people; it effects our pets and the surrounding environment.
The house was no longer liveable, and all our belongings had either flown away or were destroyed. We managed to scrape up some of the canned foods, dry some clothes and luckily our generator was ok. A friend’s house was still intact, so he let us stay while we provided temporary power with our small generator.
Over the next few weeks, we were homeless and would use a wheelbarrow to carry any food we found and move debris. There were no electricity and no signal, so our families had no idea we were alive. The community helped each other by moving debris out the road and trying to create shelters as we did not get much external aid or shelter homes. Me and my family would take our tricycle that was luckily still working to transport clean drinkable water and food to people the best we could.
We had to spend Christmas in a small place provided to us by a friend and cooked a Christmas dinner with the food my family and family friends managed to save. There were no Christmas presents, but a gift we did get was a neighbouring resort finding signal and letting us use it to call our family in the UK to tell them we were ok. They then booked us flights to move to the UK.
These situations have direct and indirect impacts on people’s lives.
We evacuated the island with one suitcase to share with my family as all we had left fit into that one suitcase. Evacuation was scary as people were all trying there best to manage to fit and get on the plane. It wasn’t a normal plane though; it was an army plane with no normal seats so most people were sat on boxes and anything they could till they got to the mainland in hopes of something better.
These natural disasters still happen in the Philippines and other countries, more frequently now too. There are constantly people being impacted and being displaced from their homes. People like me must leave everything they built in their life and start over with no belongings left for fond memories.
It is not just moving house. It is the struggle of changing a whole life around because people are too stubborn to make changes and help reduce these effects of climate change. It is reality.
So, hopefully after reading this you stop blaming the people around you and get your hands dirty to fight climate change.