VOLCANO ERUPTION!!!

Magandang Araw Po,

It's More Fun in the Philippines:

WELL, HERE IS HOW IT ALL WENT DOWN!!!

Sunday afternoon we were only 3 Kilometers away from the Taal Volcano when it erupted. Smoke and ash immediately poured out of the top of the volcano. Not long after the eruption a storm began to break out from the smoke in the air. Lightning struck from the middle of the smoke cloud, and not long after earthquakes began rolling through. Originally we weren't too worried, and we continued visiting with people. However, as the sun went down the earthquakes became more frequent and were no more than a few minutes between each other. On top of that, the lightning was at this point without stop. Although the sun was gone it was not fully dark because of the constant lightning. Most of this occurred in only about an hour of time. With the sun now gone and everything seeming worse we began receiving texts that everyone in our area and everyone near it must evacuate immediately. I began calling the other missionaries near us and told them all to grab a few days of clothes and to immediately head to Nasugbu where I planned to meet them. We were the furthest away and had no time to get home, so with none of our clothes or stuff we hitched a ride in the back of two pick-up trucks in order to get to Nasugbu. When we finally got there we were just barely able to catch the final bus at 8:00PM with the other 8 missionaries. After about an hour of driving, the bus driver told us that roads were now closed and the bus would have to go back to Batangas (the place we are trying to get away from). I told him we would just get off the bus right there, and although he was very against it he allowed us to get off. Imagine, we are in the middle of nowhere, it is pitch black, and we are a group of foreigners that jumped off a bus in the middle of the highway. From there we waited as a few other missionaries brought a van to pick us all up. We were wearing masks as ash fell over us. After waiting for quite some time, we got picked up and headed to Cavite. The roads were covered in thick mud and the sky rained what seemed like muddy ash. One of the elders had to jump off every 10 minutes to clean the windshield because the windshield wipers could not handle the thickness of the mud. At midnight we rolled into cavite and headed in for bed. The following day we couldn't leave the apartment, so we pulled out a radio to listen to the news. As we listened they asked if anyone had died, and the man responded by saying no one had died, but there were reports of 10 foreigners that were abandoned in Tagaytay last night, and no one knew what happened to them. HAHAH!! We were all huddled around the radio and we just started yelling, "THAT WAS US!!!!"

Ultimately, we are all safe, but much damage has been done to places near the volcano (my area especially), and prayers for those people that live there is much needed. Most of them have escaped, but they don't have a great home to come back to when all of this is over.

Elder Hemmert

Lemery, Batangas (But in Molino, Cavite)