I've always yearned to help others to save the needy from suffering.

You see, the world doesn't need imagined monsters.

Plenty of real ones haunt humanity every day.

Disease, poverty, oppression.

All scarier than the demons and horror stories.

So I thought.

Seven years ago, the charity I worked for sent me to the Philippines to help a few villagers

prepare evacuation plans in case of flooding.

The poverty was bad enough.

The first village lay next to a dirty trash-soaked river.

The Nepah houses rested and still stood upon caked mud.

I met a sprawling jungle.

Two opposing tree stumps, perched buckets.

That's how I described the basketball court.

Despite this, the villagers exuded joy.

During the afternoon's siestas, men would gather on plastic tables and pass around coconut

wine or playing cards or maja.

And in the evening, they'd congregate in the village captain's house and sing 90s classics

in the karaoke machine, sometimes until the roosters crud.

They got the Nepah wood for the houses from mangroves that lined the river's edge like

a wall of roots.

As strong as the material was, a fierce flood could annihilate an entire Nepah village

...