Monday, November 10, 2008

The Life-Line That Was Snapped

Rainy season is here again.
Aida is braving herself to face the coming flood. Should it happen, she has to be very, very brave.
She had faced it before - twice last year.

When the water started to rise, both husband and wife hastily piled up all the furnitures in the shop ceiling-high in the middle of the night till the wee hours the next morning.
Then they locked the grill-gate and went home to sleep.

They could not go home to sleep - water, water, and more water everywhere. Flood forced them to stay in a nearby school. The road leading to their house was simply non-existent.
How about the shop? All the furnitures in the shop?
That's the family's life-line.They went back to the shop to check.

Upon pulling up the gate, her heart sank. Her eyes watered. Both husband and wife were speechless - all the furnitures they stack-up the whole night earlier on, were gone.
The gush of water that entered the shop forced the bottom furniture to soften thus, those piled-up collapsed, soaked to the core. The scenario all around were furnitures with hundreds of flapping wings.
They left the shop exhausted with the sight.

Many days they did not open their shop.
Countless days they did not see their house. When finally they did go home, they could not believe their eyes - all doors in the house ajar! Even the doors of the fridge.
Almost all things in the house were not theirs. There's a Chinese ancestral praying altar in the house too.

They cleaned the house and the husband rewired the disconnected power supply. They use what's in the house which they know did not belong to them.

With the little energy left in them, they went to their shop - they discarded almost RM200,000 worth of flapping wings furnitures.
******

When life was about to return to normal, another flood hit for the second time - this time around, the water rose to almost 2 meter high.

She did not loose much in the second flood even though until today she still could not recoup the first lost but she knows of those owners who lost for the second time, the neighbouring shops, the supermarket, the clothing outlet, are all in the mental institution.

For...
They not only lost their money and heavy in debt, they have lost their sane mind.