By Cong Corrales
EIGHT years ago yesterday morning, a journalist-friend and I were busy with last-minute preparations for a dialogue between the top brass of Camp Alagar and officers of Cagayan de Oro Press Club and the local chapter of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines on the rising media shootings in the city.
I remember Archbishop Antonio Ledesma, SJ accepted our request to serve as the arbiter of the dialogue. It was important to hold the dialogue because a week before that day, Bombo James Licuanan became the second media worker shot in the city that year. The first one being Nilo Labares. Fortunately, both radio anchors survived the gun attacks on them.
The dialogue went well. Both sides agreed to work better together in addressing the culture of impunity that was creeping across the city.
We were all in high spirits that day since the dialogue was a success. The discussion was unabashed, frank, and seemed honest enough.
But that feeling would be doused later that day as typhoon Sendong (international name: Washi) poured some 500mm of torrential rains across Northern Mindanao.
By early evening, I was preparing to attend our high school batch reunion party at the then Party Venue, it is now called N Hotel. I felt lazy dressing up for the party and ended up watching Novo Terra and decided to stay at home.
Ailyn also had a scheduled party to go to that night. Envying the thought that I was just lounging around the room watching TV, she also decided to stay home for the night. It was to be the best decision we made that fateful year.
When the power went out for the second time at around 9 pm, the winds started howling like some wounded feral creature. Our tin roof rattled as if ready to be ripped out by the winds at any minute.
I gathered the children and coaxed them to practice their Christmas carols to take their minds off the scary sounds of the winds.
It was certainly a first for my family. I never thought I’d see flood waters come in waves — as in, foams of water at its crest. It couldn’t have been a tsunami since the rampaging waters came from the hinterlands.
My ex-girlfriend wanted to cross the street, to check on her parents inside the family compound, but the floodwaters rose from knee-high to neck-deep in just about eight seconds. Within seconds after that, cars and motorelas started floating by our veranda. Hours later, mining earth-moving equipment followed suit. One particular dump truck banged the side of our two-story, seven-decade-old wooden house.
I still see those sedans floating by our veranda in my recurring nightmares. One of which even got stuck on our roof. It turned out to be the car of my ex-girlfriend’s cousin, who lived seven houses from ours. It reeked of gasoline. My son and I tried to push it away from the house with a bamboo pole but it wouldn’t budge.
The next day, eight years ago today, we found out why we couldn’t budge the car. Motorelas and about four trisikads stacked up underneath our roof that effectively locked the car in place. The Toyota Corolla would nestle on our roof for the next three weeks.
In the aftermath of Sendong, my youngest, who was seven years old then, stopped talking. She stopped talking after she saw the dead bodies of animals and people, some were just children as young as her, strewn about in the knee-high muddy streets the morning after the storm.
I was diagnosed to have been “clinically depressed” by a psychiatrist sent by the Department of Health weeks after the storm. She prescribed anti-depression drugs.
We lost friends and relatives to Sendong. Some of them died during the onslaught of the floods while others died of Leptospirosis days later.
While I still remember that night in vivid detail, I also remember the help and support I received from our friends and my colleagues. I will be forever grateful to them as their response restored my faith in humanity.
