January 19, 2022 | 2:30PM

As what we've learnt that experience could really help you grow even more as a person, I never really thought that it would mean that much. Just until we've had our share of experience during the recent Typhoon Odette last December 16, 2021.

It's been a month but the memory of it, still remains fresh.

We were living our good days in Baybay City, Leyte as it is where we were working at that time. But as days came closer to the date of landfall of the typhoon, we can already fell that there's going to be rain the past few days as it was expected to be a strong heck of a typhoon. Strong winds were already evident and that we thought we could just keep working until there's an announcement that we should our operations temporarily.

We were a bit confident at that time as even at the day before the landfall, even when we were advised to stay in our center of operations instead of doing it on the field, we pushed it through as we only experienced light rains at those very moments.

Yep, everything was still fine. We chose not to go home and stayed in the city as we thought that we could immediately go to work a day after the typhoon would soon subside. That night we bought our usual food for dinner, fried chicken, froms yours truly, Crispy King haha. Had our dinner and slept few hours later. Not knowing tomorrow will be scare the hell out of us.

We were really not prepared during those times, imagine we bought our provisions the morning before the storm actually hit. We can clearly observe some people panicked in buying necessities and the ATMs were always on a very long queue and would sometimes result to machine unavailability. Luckily, we had withdrawn cash earlier so we don't have to be in a long queue and immediately bought food enough for what thought during that day. Then had our lunch later and stayed online browsing for news updates.

At around 3:30PM, last December 16,2021 , that's when all the feeling of fear started. Strong winds were all around us, and that was when the roof of our rented room flew away into the neighborhood haha. It was surge of mixed emotions for us, we were scared yet laughing at the same time as we were trying to evacuate to a safer house that time. But that did not end there, we came back to our crumbled rented space to retrive what we could. We came back for our clothes and electronics and immediately returned to the safer house walking like ducks in fear of flying objects around that may hit us.

Everything changed us overnight, we were full of realizations. We were so scared for our families as we were kilometres away from them and we have no means of communication to them at that moment because communication lines and service became off at the midst of the typhoon landfall. All we can do during that time was pray to God and be hopeful that everything is alright. At around 7PM that day, we felt relief as the strong winds and heavy rains has finally subsided. That was the time that we finally had the appetite to eat dinner and sleep afterwards.

Everything was going great.

This is where we used to stay during our workdays in Baybay City. The photo was taken weeks before the typhoon struck.

Everything really went well, but after that we were starting to feel a bit hopeless as this is what we saw.

We were left clueless as what we should do at that very moment, but then we chose to go home. Back to our town, as most of our belongings were wet and water was still scarce that time as it was plugged off by the Water District due to the typhoon. We head home to clean our things, do the laundry, and to heal our thoughts from the storm that we just encountered.

We never know, that such things would instill lessons to your life and make you realize certain things.

Yes,we were sad because of what happened. But I am still lucky that when I came home safe, and everyone was fine.

I can't thank God more that I'm still blessed. Hoping and praying for the speedy recovery to our brothers and sisters in Southern Leyte who were heavily affected.