Not a single town or village has been spared from Haiyan’s wrath along the 150 km seaside drive from Palo, in the province of Leyte, across Eastern Samar to Carapdapan.

It’s frightening for Malou, seeing all these wrecked villages on the way to find her parents.

People have warned her that the roads through Samar are dangerous, with cliffside chunks missing and desperate thieves ready to rob travellers of money and supplies.

Malou found a driver, but can only afford to hire him and buy gas for two days, so the plan is to take an overnight trip. It will cost her $240. If not for the typhoon, she could have taken a bus or hitched a ride for a few bucks.

The drive takes more than four hours, the van dipping and popping, veering left to right along the bumpy roads, dodging locals raking wet rice across tarps laid out on the pavement. Many homes along the sea have simply vanished; only their bamboo stilts remain, poking out of the earth.

By mid-afternoon, the van approaches Carapdapan.

“Stop!” she calls out suddenly at a fork in the road. She jumps out of the vehicle and approaches a group of men fixing the road. “Is this the way to Carapdapan?” she asks.

The men nod, pointing down a hill. Yes, that way.

The van rolls down the steep slope and along a narrow seaside road, moving slowly, over ruts and holes.

“My heart beats so fast,” Malou says.

Carapdapan is a tiny barangay, population 300 or so. Nearly everyone here is related to Malou. She will learn there were no casualties in the village. The winds blew houses down, leaving some residents homeless and left to sleep under makeshift shelters, but Carapdapan didn’t see the deadly storm surges that caused mass casualties elsewhere.

In the centre of the village, only the front and back wall of what was once a beautiful local church remain. Up the hill, the local school is ruined, too.

The van stops in front of a wooden house that looks like it has been bombed. Only two tiny rooms at the front are still habitable; the back has no roof, no walls. This is where Malou’s parents live.

A dozen people are gathered around a table in a narrow pathway between the Bandoy house and the neighbouring home of an aunt. Their jaws drop when they see Malou climb out of the van.

“Malou!” they shout. “It’s Malou!”

A gaggle of nieces and nephews hop around excitedly. “Ate Malou is here!” Roosters and chickens scamper out of the way, flapping their wings. Across the street, a group of boys playing basketball stop their game and sit at the edge of the road, watching the reunion with wide eyes.

Malou reaches for her mother first and pulls her close. Both women cry as they hold each other. Maria wipes her eyes with the inside of her sweater.

Emilio, quiet and sullen, stares at the ground.

When Malou tells her parents she has come to take them to Cebu, her father scowls, shakes his head.

“No,” he says. He’s not going anywhere.

An argument erupts. Malou becomes a little girl again, shouting and stamping her feet. She has come all the way from Canada. Won’t he come to Cebu, even for a few weeks, just to forget the trauma? She will take care of them.

Her brother, Noel, a skinny man with an eye damaged from a childhood injury, sits on the stairs, staring down at a gaping wound on his hand, one arm around Tan Tan, the boy who lived. Father and son have deep cuts along their arms. Noel has a gash on his head. They are quiet.

“Walang komunikasyon! Walang komunikasyon!” Malou shouts at her father. No communication. Even before the storm, the cellular service in this area was terrible. How is she supposed to check on them?

Malou is on her knees, sobbing, clutching her father’s shoulders, slapping his thighs, begging him to come with her for a month, a week, just until things get better here.

Malou’s father can’t look her in the eye.

Emilio is 76. Maria is 73. They moved to Carapdapan five years ago from the family home in Tacloban after Emilio, who had retired from his job at a grocery store, lost his briefly-held elected position as a barangay chairman. Around the same time, Malou’s sister, Fe, decided to bring her children to live with her in America, after they’d been with their grandparents for many years. Malou’s parents became depressed.

Moving to Carapdapan, the village Maria grew up in, had made everything better.

They know no one in Cebu, Malou’s father says. Here, they have relatives who can help them. Here, they can help themselves. Elsewhere they would have to rely on others, strangers perhaps.

“This is our happy place,” he says.

Malou, Eusebio and Fe had been saving to build a new home for their parents and other siblings in Carapdapan, with a budget of $25,000. How can we build you a home here now, Malou asks, after what has happened?

She tries another approach. “Come with me to Canada,” she says.

Emilio shakes his head: No again. “Here I am happy. What should I do there?”

“I would die in Canada,” he says, which prompts laughter from his sons, who tease their father about testing out the life of an “Americano.”

The jokes ease the tension. The conversation is over.

“Don’t worry about us,” Emilio says quietly to his daughter. “We want a simple life.”

Malou stands behind her father, arms around his neck. They remain in this embrace for a long time, saying nothing.