SENDONG REVISIT: ONE THING YOU MAY WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THIS TRAGEDY BUT HESITATE TO ASK

To commemorate the 10^th anniversary of the Sendong tragedy, I had lined up this article to come out in December, until I read a singer who has released her new Christmas song as early as September with this reason that I adopted: Why not?

RAYMOND:

In our work with the poor in Couples for Christ, we repaired roofs by sealing small holes and replacing damaged sheets. In one instance, heavy rain suddenly poured. All at once, the kids scrambled for containers, like pails or empty cans, and put them right on the spots where drops of water would fall from the leaking roof above when it rained. Everyone smiled after they learned that not a single drop of water had leaked from the repaired roof. The needless routine engendered a light-hearted feeling on the kids affected by the downpour. But, those who had been traumatized by the Sendong tragedy would even more so exude heavy-hearted feelings -- each time a torrent of rain comes.

Months before such tragedy, we drove to Orchids subdivision in Iligan and dropped by the newly-built house of Analiza, my wife's officemate. The site's low elevation and its topsoil that appeared to be a backfill drew my attention as a civil engineer. I told Analiza to be on alert in case of a sudden downpour.

On the night the tragedy struck, I had dinner with my wife and daughter. Everything seemed normal except this unusual event: drizzling outside, all of a sudden, our curtains rose horizontally due to a sudden strong rush of wind – too odd a sight amid the calm outside. The phone rang; it was our son calling from Jollibee -- two rides from our house. He asked me to fetch him because he was anxious about the rain getting stronger each minute. Driving home, I looked at the Tubod bridge and spotted the water level as not yet alarming. Felt safe, since our house sat on higher ground, we just slept the whole night away.

CHERRIE:

The phone rang; it was past six in the morning. Manny, our bank manager, called up and told me to cancel our reservation at Dad's Grill for our Christmas party that night. He said he could not get out of his house located alongside the river that had overflowed and flooded his house first floor. I called up Dan, my officemate, who lived near the party venue, and told him to cancel our reservation. Minutes later, he called back, his voice cracking, and narrated about the dead bodies that piled up on both sides of the highway. Later, ABS-CBN News reported:

Since the rains fell on regions where the natural forest had been illegally logged or converted to pineapple plantations, the heavy rains were able to run off quickly on the relatively barren soils and created devastating flash floods. Since the storm hit the middle of the night and affected an unprepared population that had no flood warning system in place, the death toll was tragically high.

Though unprepared, like all the folks in her neighborhood, Analiza, remembered what Raymond had tipped her off in case of a sudden downpour: get out of the place and seek higher ground. Hearing rocks hitting her roofs (concerned citizens waking their neighbors), she got off the bed and felt her foot submerged in water. Alarmed, woke her kids up and told them to run and go the distance to the elevated highway. Running the sloping up road herself while carrying her baby, she kept shouting to her kids running ahead of her. She kept up in screaming constantly in order not to lose them rushing through the pitch-dark night. From her ankles, she felt the water rising up to her knees, then up to her waist, right before she reached the elevated highway where she deeply breathed a sigh of relief.

RAYMOND:

The atmosphere was thick with grim stories. A mother and her daughter hung on to anything that was floating on the debris-filled flood and then found out at daybreak they had been holding on the whole night to a dead body. A friend living along a creek heard a rolling flood reverberated a sinister noise of a living creature. A neighbor trapped inside his own house and escaped through the ceiling because the brute force of the flood held back all doors and windows shut. After the tragedy wiped out over a thousand lives with hundreds missing, what positive thing can one say?

As I hit the keys on my keyboard today, Iligan is celebrating the Feast of Saint Michael. On the celebration of the Feast nine months after the Sendong tragedy, a Muslim crowd strangely gathered at the yard of the St. Michael's Cathedral. Coming to see and to hold in great respect St. Michael the Archangel, they truly believed he was the "giant warrior" that rescued them from the Sendong flood.

Amid the religious conflicts breaking out around the world, what can be more positive than this glint of hope for unity between the two largest religions in the world honoring the Archangel under the same one God?