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Saturday, February 25, 2006
Villagers, rescuers hold memorial service for landslide victims (6:10 p.m.)
GUINSAUGON -- With candles, flowers and prayers, mourners held a memorial service on Saturday for victims of a massive landslide that buried an entire farming village, triggering a desperate, largely futile search for survivors and an outpouring of international aid.
"God, we ask you to give eternal rest to the victims of the landslide," a Roman Catholic priest said during the ceremony, held in an army tent. The tent was the command post for rescue teams, including Philippine soldiers, US Marines, Taiwanese and Malaysian experts with high-tech detection gear, and Spanish handlers with sniffer dogs.
Only 139 bodies have been recovered and nearly a thousand villagers, most of the population of Guinsaugon, are missing and presumed dead after the Feb. 17 landslide.
On Friday night, officials declared an end to the search for survivors beneath tons of mud, though they said they would continue looking for bodies for one or two weeks more before turning the area into a memorial site.
The mourners, many of them villagers who lost their homes in Guinsaugon on Leyte island, sang hymns and held hands. Some women wept, and knelt on the ground in prayer as the priest gave them communion. After the 30-minute ceremony, the grieving villagers walked to a nearby riverbank, tossed flowers into the water and placed white candles in the ground.
US Marines were among those attending, and provincial Gov. Rosette Lerias and other local officials and survivors crossed the river in two earthmovers to bless the disaster site. Priests sprinkled holy water on the ground. Lerias wept, saying she could not hold back the tears whenever she visits the area.
Villager Erlinda Cabanas, 59, also cried. Her husband, daughter, grandson and granddaughter remain missing. Cabanas was visiting a son and a daughter in Manila, the Philippine capital, when the landslide struck, and she recalled speaking to her husband, a coconut farmer, on the telephone a few days before the disaster.
"He said: 'Come home. I feel lonely,"' a distraught Cabanas said. "Now I am crying because when I got home, they were all gone."
She said she hesitated before coming to the service because seeing the devastated village was so emotionally painful. She said she was resigned to the likelihood that the bodies of her relatives would not be found in the swamp of unstable earth.
"It's so huge, how can you find anybody there?" Cabanas said. Despite days of intense digging, recovery teams operating in wet, dangerous conditions did not find any survivors except in the early hours after the landslide.
A priest who lost a sister in the disaster held a separate Mass in the middle of the landslide area. A dozen people attended the service near the site of what used to be the priest's family home.(AP)
Leyte rescue teams suffer blow: school remains lost
Rescuers step up search at landslide site (10:35 a.m.) |
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