I realized that I left out one item last night.

When we were in San Jose Barangay we were stopped by a woman who clearly wanted to talk on camera.

She lives in Germany but keeps a country house here. She makes a big deal of herself comparing her humanitarian efforts to those of Immelda Marcos, but “she did it first”. She talked about art and culture and tells us she was the first person to put a house on the shore of the water as if that too was her idea.

When talking about the arts, her feeling was “give typewriters to the monkeys and eventually you will find Shakespeare”. Clearly she is a complex woman.

There are a lot of questions about the Tacloban looting of non-essential items like TVs etc. The military told us that people just got caught up in the momentum. She said it is not in the nature of the Taclobani people to be looters so obviously the people from Samar – another Island reached by a bridge – THEY came to Tacloban and looted the stores and brought it back to Samar with them. Interestingly these materials are on sale on the streets of Tacloban and not Samar…

My favorite of her comments was when she told us that clearly the typhoon was the first test of a man made weather machine designed to devastate a community as an act of war. She could understand that, but she did not understand why it was used here when there are so many really awful places it could have done some good.

Clearly she is a bit off, but she also comes from a life of privilege. Even as she sits in her destroyed house and talks of all the art and possessions she lost, she starts to cry as she directs the cleaning of her house by the staff she has left and drops vague hints to us of the overwhelming need and also of her specific needs to restore HER home and HER art. She is not living at her house. She is staying with friends whose home fared better and where there is a maid.

All this sounds very negative and it is a good depiction of the struggles of the lower upper class – here a woman who had a lot, whose husband had passed before the storm and who was making it work just barely who is now totally crushed.

And yet, as you look across the simple home, like everything around it, he home and the life she had there is just gone and you cannot help to feel for her as she manages her own struggle – although different from others – her struggle is no less devastating.