The Swift Family Blog : July 10

We planned this to be a pretty light day because a super typhoon was supposed to hit the island in the afternoon. We first heard about the typhoon on Sunday in church and the members made sure that all of the visitors and new people know that this was supposed to be a big one and to be prepared. So we tried to stock up on extra food and water and made sure to check where we would need to go if our place got flooded. In the morning though the weather was fine, so we planned to go to the Botanical Gardens again to see the greenhouses and the National Taiwan History Museum. Turned out that all of the greenhouses are closed on Mondays and Tuesdays (we thought just Mondays) and the History Museum closed just a couple of days earlier to start on 2 years of extensive repairs. So we didn’t get to see anything that we had planned. But, on the way home we ran into two other museums that turned out to be pretty nice. The first was the 228 Museum that had a lot of information and displays about the 228 massacre, how it started, and how it led to the longest stretch of Marshall Law for any government in the world. This happened when the KMT government and Chaing Kai-Shek were still in China, shortly after they took control from the Japanese and before the communists rose to take power. The KMT had a governor in Taiwan that was pretty corrupt in his rule of the people. Further the KMT needed extra funds and goods to fight the communists on the mainland and so they often took for the Taiwanese people to support the war causes. The government also had a monopoly on selling certain goods to the people and they artificially inflated the prices to sometimes 100 times what it had been just a couple years earlier. Well on Feb 27^th in 1947 the police did a raid on a widow’s tea shop who had some contraband cigarettes. When she resisted, one of the officers hit her in the head with his gun. This caused the people who had been watching to rise up against the police, who then fled. But as they were fleeing, one of them shot his gun into the crowd and killed a man. The following morning the crowd showed up to the police department to protest and the governor sent security forces to disperse them. But the security forces just opened fire on them and killed several people. This resulted in the people from across the island rising up against the KMT government and there were several skirmishes. The governor finally calmed things down by telling the people that he would agree to a meeting where he would listen to the people’s demands. However, he was just stalling. The KMT had sent a large force of soldiers from China and when they got to Taiwan the troops went through and shut the rebellion down by killing thousands of people throughout the island. This started a period of Marshal Law where anyone who was perceived to be against the government was executed. The governor was ousted by the government for letting the rebellion happen and was later executed for wrong doings he did in a different province in mainland China. However, the Marshal Law remained in effect all the way until 1987 (that was just a little over 10 years prior to the start of my mission there). Rebecca and I thought the museum was interesting just to pick up a little bit about the history – not too much though since the displays were pretty much all in Chinese. After that we came across the postal museum. I know it sounds kind of boring, but the kids had a lot of fun here. They got to ride postal bikes and pretend to drive a postal truck and see some cool interactive displays. By about that point we saw some rain starting and decided it was time to head back to our apartment and hunker down for the typhoon. All afternoon we were watching the reports. The main typhoon wasn’t supposed to hit until about 2am, but the heavy rains were supposed to start at about 4pm. At one point the typhoon reached a category 5 (the highest category) they were estimating that it would remain at that level or drop to a category 4 by the time it hit the island. We didn’t know much about the different categories, so we read a little online about what they mean. Here is what we read: “Category 4: Winds range from 131 to 155 mph and can cause catastrophic damage to property, humans, and animals. Severe structural damage to frame homes, apartments, and shopping centers should be expected. Category 4 hurricanes often include long-term power outages and water shortages lasting from a few weeks to a few months, so again, it’s important for any remaining residents to have a significant nonperishable food and water supply at hand. Category 5: Winds at or greater than 155 mph cause catastrophic damage to property, humans, and animals (read: you should be nowhere near this storm!). Complete or almost-complete destruction of mobile homes, frame homes, apartments, and shopping centers should be expected, and nearly all trees in the area will be snapped or uprooted. Power outages can last for weeks and possibly months. Long-term water shortages should be expected as well, and most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.” After we read that some of the kids were freaked out (Julia), others were excited (Christian and Elliott), and some in-between (Ethan). Well the typhoon ended up dropping down to a Category 3 by the time is was near the island and the center shifted so it hit just north of the island. So all we got was heavy rains all night long.

Back at the National Gardens.

At the 228 Museum. I don't think the kids were actually supposed to get in this one, but they believed the removed bricks meant it was a place for them to enter.