When I walked into the teacher's lounge in the Taiwanese school where I work one Thursday two weeks ago I was greeted with enthusiastic shouts. "Typhoon's coming!" My co-workers informed me. "No work tomorrow!" I got excited. I've lived in Taiwan for five years and have seen many typhoons, but have only enjoyed a handful of typhoon days. A typhoon day is rare occasion when the government calls off work in certain places, and sometimes the whole country, because of an especially large and imminent typhoon. Tainan, the southern city that I live in, is relatively sheltered from typhoons by the mountains so typhoon days are rare, an unexpected day off of work that sparks an excitement in expat English teachers similar to that felt by Canadian students when they hear that the school is cancelled for snow. There are impromptu house parties and expat pubs are filled with teachers eating and drinking with friends as the storm whips the city outside with wind and rain.

We didn't think there was anything to worry about. Damage was usually minimal. A few signs would be blown off buildings, branches would be broken off of trees, and mudslides would wash away roads in remote areas. Everything would be cleaned up in a few days.

Well, that was what usually happened.

Morakot would be different. By the time I returned to work on Monday, Morakot would drench the island in 2.7 metre of rain, more than the country's average annual rainfall, causing the worst flooding in half a century. It would kill at least 650 people. It would level the village of Xiaolin, just an hour's drive from my house, where as I write hundreds of bodies are still buried under meters of thick muck. When all was said and done Morakot would cause an estimated $274 million USD in damage countrywide.

Morakot was the most destructive typhoon to hit Taiwan in over fifty years. Of course my girlfriend and I didn't know that on Friday night as we shot pool with an Egyptian restaurateur and a German engineer in a local expat pub. To me, it didn't seem very bad. It was windy, but not as rainy as other typhoons I'd seen.

On Saturday morning the typhoon continued. Now it was raining harder, but it still didn't seem like anything special. The typhoon did, though, seem to be lasting an abnormally long time. Typhoons usually move across Taiwan and continue towards China after about one day. This was the key to the excessive destruction caused by Morakot. Not strength, but endurance. Unique meteorological conditions had caused Morakot to stall over Taiwan. Morakot would pummel Taiwan with wind and rain for three days - three times as long as most typhoons.

Apparently President Ma Ying-jeou didn't find this reason for concern. That Saturday he attended a poet's wedding reception that before going to work - something he would be criticized for repeatedly in the political fallout after the typhoon. Ma was going to be lambasted for his administration's slow reaction to the disaster. The administration's reaction was so poor, and the public so angry, that the Washington Post would dub Morakot "Ma Ying-jeou's Katrina." Some people in Taiwan now simply refer to Morakot as Katrina. This, combined with Ma's initial refusal to accept international aid, would result in the Harvard graduate's approval rating plummeting to less than 20 percent in under two weeks.

By Saturday night flooding was widespread. We heard a little about it from the news, but the message didn't really hit home until around 12 a.m. when an announcement was made in the pub where we were drinking that anyone with a ground-level house should think about staying with friends. Tainan's reservoir was about to breach. We gasped. Was this possible? Could Tainan flood? The breach remark, however, was a mistranslation; officials were preparing to open the floodgates. Either way, this was the first indication to us that something serious was happening.

By this time many cities less than fifty kilometers away were already flooded, in some places up to two stories deep. My friend Andy, who lived in a nearby city, posted on Facebook that he could see fragments of shattered signs and branches flying upwards outside of his 15th floor apartment. Outside of my window there were no broken signs, but the rain appeared to be falling alternately up and sideways, and occasionally in circles.

Most of the damage was done on Sunday. Houses in mountain villages began to slide away en masse. A six-story hotel in a popular resort town toppled over, it's foundations eroded by a swollen river (the video can be found on YouTube.com using the search terms Taiwan, hotel and river). Flooded streets became impassable and Namasiya, the village where my friend Richard Matheson lived, began to slide down the mountain forcing residents to flee on foot up the mountainside in search of stable ground. The story of the village (Matheson fortunately was not there) can be read his blog, www.lieftaiwan.com. When I ventured across the Tainan to a friend's house I encountered massive tree branches and signs in the road and flooding that was in some places waist deep.

Sunday night the storm abated. Monday morning we awoke to the news that the village of Xialoin, which was very close to Namasiya, had been buried in a mudslide early that morning. They didn't know if anyone had survived.

If there is one thing that can be said for the Taiwanese people, it's that they know about hardship. In the last hundred years they've weathered annual typhoons, regular earthquakes, aboriginal rebellions, Chinese and Japanese occupations, a government slaughter of an estimated 28,000 people during the White Terror followed by 38 years of martial law, the constant threat of Chinese invasion and most recently, in 1999, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake in the middle of the country that killed more than 2400 people and toppled over 8000 buildings causing $90 million USD in damage. Since that earthquake then they've struggled through an economic recession (that was compounded by the global recession) and two lame-duck presidents, both of whom have been compared to George W. Bush.

But do they give up? Never. Have they become hardened and jaded? Hell no. The Taiwanese are incorrigibly kind, generous and cheerful.

How did the Taiwanese react to the tragedy wrought by Morakot? The same way they always have. They came together and persevered. So many people volunteered to help in the cleanup the following weekend that anyone who applied too late in the week was turned away for lack of space. Matheson, who had been heavily involved in the relief effort, had given up collecting used clothing for the refugees after visiting the shelters and seeing that an ample supply of brand new clothing had already been donated. Such is the generosity of the Taiwanese.

Some friends and I volunteered the following weekend with a large Taiwanese charity. We met at an elementary school where hundreds of Taiwanese were waiting at 6:30 am Saturday morning to go and help their fellow country people to clean the mud from their streets and houses.

That Saturday morning Taiwan's countryside was in ruins, hundreds were dead, the economy was in shambles, and the President was being asked to resign. Yet at that elementary school, at 6:30 in the damned morning, the atmosphere was anything but morose. People were chatting and joking. One woman, who looked to be about sixty, was enthusiastically high-fiving each person in line as they boarded the bus, literally jumping in the air with every hand slap.

Another disaster? No big deal. We'll just get together and clean it up...again. That was the mentality.

Our bus was sent to a nearby village to clean out the town hall. The village had been severely flooded. The high water mark on the walls of the Town Hall was 3 m. I couldn't believe it. The main streets had been cleared, but when we walked down a side street to see how local houses had fared we encountered a blanket of knee-deep muck that sucked the gumboots off of our feet. The volunteers spent the day sweating in the glaring sun, laughing and joking, and scrubbing mud from the floors and walls. I'd never seen such perseverance. I knew then that although Morakot had gotten the best of the country for three days, now Taiwan was going to kick its ass. These people would keep coming back again, and again, until the job was done.

Typhoon Morakot didn't change much for the Taiwanese. They'll bury their dead as they have before. They'll mourn together and rebuild again, just as they have so many times before. They'll do it in true Taiwanese style - cheerfully.

But after Morakot, Taiwan won't be the same. Not for me. I'll never enjoy a typhoon day as much. I'll always wonder in the back of my mind, "How's this one going to turn out?" And one thing is for sure. I'll never look at the Taiwanese people the same way again.

Matt Gibson of Cranbrook is living, working and writing in Taiwan

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