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Sunday, June 11, 2006
Sunstar Essay: Lest we forget
By Erma M. Cuizon
Sun.star essay
One day in a barrio in Leyte, about 300 pupils with their mothers and teachers celebrated Women’s Health Day in school when the mountain some distance away exploded. The avalanche slid and rumbled on its way down in a wild roar until it buried the village in mud and rocks, 550 to 600 meters down.
This is one of those things a nation must never forget, in order to grow wiser, to learn, to forgive. From time to time, we need to reflect on it for our own good.
Only four days after the landslide, recorded were 24 female casualties and 12 male, 48 unidentified as of then. But the counting and the search of survivors after February 17 would continue. And more women would be counted as casualties because of the women’s grouping on that day.
When I first saw the area, it was when I realized the power that God keeps, said the woman governor of the province.
Southern Leyte Gov. Rosette Lerias today says that 21 million cubic meters of nature’s debris covered an area of 232 hectares in a matter of minute. There was no evacuation, the way disasters round the world are pictured--–there was nothing but a wide spread of mud under where life disappeared with hardly a trace.
It’s a bit over three months past but the memory today of the Guinsaugon landslide in St. Bernard town still stays, and it will take years for the families of the victims to forget it, if they ever will---one losing 20 loved ones, another 12 in the family, still another 17 of the clan, not to talk of friends and mentors gone.
We had been planning to talk to Lerias and see the event from the eyes of a woman concerned, for her position in the province that made her a victim, just the same, although she lost no one and lost nothing.
Today, what she remembers are the sleepless nights in between times when she would cry, then feel recharged for another day, managing the search for survivors. She stayed on for 11 days before finally putting a stop to the search. It looked to others that she wasn’t giving up sooner than would be realistic and safe, with the volunteers risking their lives under the same hostile nature of rain and mud sinking deeper.
A rescue worker said, “Everyone is waiting for the word that it’s over but no one wants to say it.”
And the decision to stop the search was Lerias’, after the advice of the scientific search parties and international disaster workers.
When she first arrived in Guinsaugon from Maasin on Feb. 17 after a call from St. Bernard Mayor Mary Lim, Lerias entered the barrio through a road that just a day ago was the way to the community that had disappeared. The earth was muddy; some rocks were still rolling down.
“Sige pa ni,” said one in her party, and so Lerias called off the search for the day.
That was going to be the call for the volunteer workers--–search and stop and….
At that point, she wasn’t giving up. She somehow refused to see the signs--–only the top of a couple of coconut trees, nothing else, two arms raised from the mud with no body attached to it. There was a single head, too, attached to nothing.
Among the survivors pulled out was a kid who said, “Nipalit man gud ko og gas” that was why he was safely away from the disaster. A man who lost his family said “Nanumbaye man gud ko,” saying he went to another barangay in a leisurely visit.
An international woman rescuer pulled a body from the mud but which was ingested as though by a ghost right back down, she couldn’t hold on to it
When would the search stop?
An official from an international search party came, perhaps to find out whether Lerias would be able to end the search.
The casualty count would increase--–139 bodies found, 973 believed dead under the earth.
The turning point was a ride Lerias took in a Chinook helicopter, for her to see the entire area, and watch the movement of the searchers. They looked like ants in a whole wide world of mud, and she couldn’t imagine ants having found dead bodies at all, or even saved living victims. And she knew that had she gotten the view of this sooner, she would have stopped the search earlier, seeing no hope in a week’s search, thinking it was time now to rebuild.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (June 11, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
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