Pajareo sin fronteras

In which someone in the Philippines to research natural disasters ends up being caught in one.  December 13, 2015: 10:00 AM Sorsogon City , Sorsogon It's Sunday morning in Sorsogon, my new home in the Philippines (how did I get here? Stay tuned for a long explanation in a future blog post!). The weather is typical for December in Bicol, the long, skinny peninsula hanging off of southeastern Luzon; pleasantly cool for the Philippines (80 degrees fahrenheit), and alternating between partly sunny and rainy and drizzling. The only sign that there's something wrong is the posts I see on Facebook warning of an approaching typhoon:  Typhoon Melor , or Nona, as it's referred to here (the Philippines has its own typhoon naming system that it uses for storms that enter its area of responsibility). It was originally named "Nonoy", but that was quietly changed when it was realized it had an unfortunate resemblance to Noynoy, the nickname of the current  president...

“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news”  - John Muir One of the many random contradictions of my life is that, despite the fact that I routinely seek out places that are in the tropics and/or swelteringly hot, I've always been more of a cold weather person. I grew up in Northern Michigan and went to school in Vermont. I'm usually one of the last people to put on a coat every fall. I'm good at cold weather. Needless to say, the Philippines isn't exactly the country for me. People here joke that there are three seasons in Manila: mainit, mas mainit, and masyadong mainit (hot, hotter, and too hot). Personally I'd argue that weather is pretty much always in the masyadong mainit  range, but that's just me. So, when I found out that Grace and Lauren, two of the other Fulbright scholars in the Philippine...