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| Tinkerbell, Peter Pan, and Captain Hook enjoying the holidays |
For Taiwan, this summer/fall has been an eventful one. Around June- October is typhoon season. This year has been especially bad because they had experienced multiple storms that were some of the worst in its history. After we returned, we experienced a few typhoons, but none hit our city directly and as badly, as the storm that hit while we were on furlough in the US this past summer. Our city had a lot of damage. Not long after we returned late August, we found out our landlord had put our house up for sale and 3 days after learning that, it was sold. So we started packing up our house and looking for a new place. We had started packing in September and in the beginning of October we had another tropical storm (It is a tropical storm just before it becomes a typhoon, the weakest typhoon being a category 1). During this storm, it had rained a LOT. That day, Elliot was in school, Maelynn was taking a nap, and Magan and I had just gotten off of skype. Ezra was running around the house playing when suddenly Ezra says, "There's water!". Magan and I assumed he had spilled a cup of water and had gotten up to see what kind of mess he had made. We quickly realized that water was rushing in from outside. Our house sat just below street level and since the drains had gotten blocked, the water on the streets had no where to go. So the water came into our place and all of our neighbor's houses. The water just kept coming and coming in and there was no way to stop it.
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| Cleaning after the flood in our home |
Since we were in the middle of moving we had boxes stacked all over our house so we quickly grabbed boxes and rushed them up to the second floor. The water got as high as 7 inches, and around an hour later, it all started to drain back out of the house (Praise God!). Since we had so much water in our house Ezra thought it was a great time to practice his back stroke and freestyle swimming. He had so much fun while mom and dad were stressed out and trying to move things as quickly as possible. Someone unplugged the drains and plus the rain had finally slowed down (after 2 days of pouring down rain) so the water started to subside. Some of our friends in the city came to help us dry the floor and clean it so that it wouldn't mould as quickly. We lost some cheap book cases, the legs to our dining table are pealing, and we spent a lot of time repacking boxes and drying out the books we wanted to save.
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| Everything that was lost (not too bad) |
Overall we felt rather blessed it wasn't worse. Since all of that happened, we were eager to move into our new house, but we had to wait another week for it to be ready for us to move in. We luckily had an outreach team here during our move and were able to move the majority of our stuff within 2 days. So now we have mostly settled into our new place. We have been in the new house for almost two months. In our next post we hope to put pictures of our new place.
In the month of November we celebrated Maelynn's first birthday and she started walking about a week before she turned one! She's growing too fast. :)
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| Playing Candy Land with their toys |
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| Maelynn having some breakfast amidst the move |
