Waiting places

The setting is always different. Sometimes it is a field, in the center of the valley. The sky is blue. The clouds are fat. The ground is spread with mud the color of melting chocolate ice cream. There are no trees or grass or lines of children’s laundry. This is what is left: sky, ground, cliff and an old man in a blue-striped shirt looking at where his son’s home used to stand.

Sometimes it is a school with walls painted with mud. The principal is counting the students, but the numbers never match. Two dead, she says. Ten missing. Or maybe six missing. She is not sure, and neither are the parents.

Sometimes it is a stretch of sand, where there used to be a farm. The man lost wife and mother and grandmother and children, and is looking for the bodies. They found one child near the house where the man stayed the night of the storm after he decided to die, and was dragged out of the water bleeding by neighbors. He was holding two of his babies, and then suddenly they were gone. At first he answered when asked. Now he is quiet, and his neighbors are afraid.

The places change; the stories are the same. There are pictures in frames the size of a child’s arm. There are the stories, the same ones, again and again. What he said last. What she wore. She is missing, they are missing, my child is missing, Papa is missing, wait, just wait.

There is a song the children sing in Santiago, Iligan. I heard it last Thursday, in the early afternoon. I had a camera and a microphone and maybe that was why they ran to grin into the lens. It was a group of small boys singing, in the school gym of the Iligan City East High School. One had lost his cousin, another an uncle.

They sing it on the streets, laughing, and they will sing it for anyone who asks. It is a happy tune, sung like a nursery rhyme, and the others join in and repeat.

Maraming patay sa dagat, na lumulutang, dahil may mga tao, na di nakuha. There are many dead in the sea, floating. Because there are people whose bodies were never retrieved.

There is a village in Hinaplanon, Iligan, where the logs still lie in layers, and those who have been there before know that when they step on the logs, they are walking on the dead. The locations change by the week. Now it is a school in Mandulog, where the arms of chairs are used to pound in nails. Now it is Cagayan, where one house remains standing at the highest point of a mountain, where neighbors ran ahead of the rising waters, and now cannot remember the way down. Now it is the bowl of Compostela Valley, where a landslide buried 27 just as North Mindanao was finding its feet.

I’ll tell you a story, about a teacher I met. Her name is Reynilda Alferez, school principal of Iligan East, and every day she heads to the evacuation centers with candy in her pocket. Some of her students have lost everything, parents, brothers, homes. Some of her teachers lost the same. Every family has five, six, seven children. Some have been given tents, to share with other families. She shakes her head, says a family needs its private moments. What if Maria spreads her legs to the wrong man?

On the day after the storm, she rode a motorcycle through the mud, but the classrooms wouldn’t open, because there was water and mud inside. She laughs too, says some students have told her they are grateful for the storm, because they’ve never tasted corned beef before.

Her school was built beside a dump. There are shanties there too, with salvaged Christmas trees and cows that graze on McDonald’s leftovers. For years after the school was built her students wore masks to class because of the stench. They planted flowers and fruits, painted walls green, and inside the school, littering was a criminal act. It is, of course, a difficult image to see, as there are now logs inside classrooms with inch-thick layers of mud. The school records are lost, and she raises an eyebrow here, says her bad boys will get lucky this year, because everyone will graduate with a clean slate.

There is a freshman in her school named Kenneth, and he wants to be a seaman. He is a happy boy, because there is a lot to eat, and mama and papa are alive. There is mud under his fingernails and his shirt is a donation from another small boy in Manila. Grandma is missing, but his brothers are alive.

This is not a story about counting the dead, because one is too many, and not a story about the 36 now missing in Compostela Valley. This is a story about hope, wherever it can be found, even if it means a pig in Iligan named Noche Buena who survived the Christmas storm by crouching terrified on a church altar. It is about a girl who shot 30 kilometers down a river clinging to a slab of wood, and about a farmer looking for his cow in the river, who took home instead a small boy with bleeding ears. It is about Da Boys, the janitors and staff from the University of the Philippines Diliman who decided to buy Christmas lunch for the families of Mandulog.

In Digkilaan, Iligan this is what is left: sky, ground, cliff, an old man in a blue-striped shirt looking at where his son’s home used to stand. Beside him is a boy whose ears no longer bleed, and a small girl who draws pictures of the trees in the sea.

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Many thanks to Kiri Dalena, Dingus Gustilo, Eloi Hernandez, John Javellana, the Philippine Red Cross and Rappler.com. Video can be found at https://bit.ly/y6YFIP