Mother loses 3 children in ‘Sendong’ tragedy

ILIGAN CITY, Philippines – Joan Valdez was clutching her four-year-old Jorniel with one arm and clinging tightly to a banana trunk with the other when she felt the life go out of him.

He twitched once, slackened, and then he was gone. In the blink of an eye, Valdez’s world crumbled, she said, and not even the muddy torrents of Tropical Storm “Sendong” could stop her tears from falling.

“I just cried and cried while I held him,” she said in Cebuano.

But her agony was not over.

Her second child, two-year-old Juraiza, would turn up dead only hours after they got separated when the surging waters came late Friday. The third, six-year-old Rizalyn, who had been torn from a relative’s grasp, is missing still.

“I wish I was the one who died, not my children,” the 26-year-old Valdez said between sobs, eyeing the two small caskets on the ground of the funeral parlor with her young son and daughter inside.

Signs of the children’s ordeal showed on their bodies, still slightly swollen, through the clear plastic sheet that gave mourners a view of their faces.

“I could stand to lose all my possessions but not them,” Valdez said.

By Saturday afternoon, as she considered her twin losses, the balut (boiled duck embryo) vendor had stopped entertaining hopes that her husband Ricky might still be alive.

Ricky, who clung to a different banana tree to survive Sendong’s fury, had thought the same of his wife.

By a stroke of serendipity, husband and wife found each other at Capin Funeral Homes in Tubod where their children were to be prepared for burial.

Both were struck dumb by the unexpected reunion, Valdez said.

She recalled the early rush of flood waters as the winds howled outside their wooden house in Duranta B in the village of Sta Filomena at past 11 p.m.

“We decided to move to the big house of our neighbor. We were sure we would be safe there,” she said. They climbed the roof, she holding Jorniel, Ricky embracing Juraiza, and a relative taking care of Rizalyn.

Then all hell broke loose.

A neighboring house that got swept in the tide slammed into the house, as the group of eight perched on the rooftop, toppling them over like bricks and spiriting them away.

“I was holding my child and we tried to swim with the current. I found a banana trunk and I just latched on to it,” Valdez recalled, her eyes red with grief.

When her son died, she remained in the water for several more minutes, wading, waiting until it calmed. She wrapped him in a blanket and set about finding the others on a shore in Taguibo, where the current had taken them some 200 meters away from their village.

She said she still clung to the hope that Rizalyn might still be alive somewhere.

At Capin Funeral Homes, dozens of relatives hung about, waiting for news about their missing families.

Missing person posters adorned a wall, made all the more tragic by the smiling faces on them, while on an opposite wall, workers had posted gruesome pictures of some of the corpses that were taken there, now with name tags.

If not for a red handkerchief wrapped around his right wrist, relatives of Victoriano Amodia, a 42-year-old pedicab driver, would not have recognized his disfigured body from the piles of corpses on the floor.

Demetrio Amodia said his brother liked to put the handkerchief on his wrist as he pedaled around the village carrying passengers.

Amodia’s face and body appeared mutilated, apparently from the impact of logs hitting him as he was carried by a wall of water that slammed into his house on Bayug Island in a settlement that was reportedly wiped out almost totally by the storm.

“His hand was raised and looked like it’s cupping something. They said it’s because he was hanging on to a log when he was found,” his sister, Josefina Amodia, 50, said.

Amodia’s entire family had been taken away by the flood. His wife Sabel and two children, Charice, 5, and Mariz, 1, had disappeared, and like so many others in this city of 100,000, are presumed dead.