Iligan couple left with only one of five children

ILIGAN CITY, Philippines—Out of so many lives lost on Bayug Island at the mouth of a river in this coastal heartland, a boy’s exceptional tale of survival is the only thing left that gives inspiration to his folks in their time of sorrow.

Eight-year-old Mike Herald Dela Gracia, who barely stands over a meter tall and cannot swim, will always be, to his parents, “the boy who lived”— the only one among five siblings to survive the horrors of December 16 and the difficult hours that followed.

Helen and Arnaldo Dela Gracia, who sell “balut” (boiled duck egg with embryo) for a living, grieve over the deaths of Shein, 7, and Aldrein, 2, and the presumed deaths  of Hana, 4, and Aldrein’s twin Aljon, who have not been seen since they were engulfed by the swirling waters sent down by Tropical Storm Sendong on Friday night.

But every time they look at their eldest, Mike Herald, an active, playful Grade 3 pupil, they are encouraged in many ways, his mother Helen, 29, said.

“The burden lightens whenever we see him. He’s the one who makes us go on,” she said in a mix of Cebuano and Tagalog at a cemetery in Barangay Pala-o, where they watched, weeping, as Shein and Aldrein were laid to rest in a mass grave.

“He is our last child. He’s the only one who lived,” Helen said of Mike Herald.

What follows is an account of this schoolboy’s extraordinary escape from death’s door, as narrated to the Inquirer by his parents:

At 11 p.m., the children were already asleep, but a worried Helen watched the Mandulog River, only 30 meters away from their house in the settlement of Purok 7-IS, as the wind howled outside and rains lashed at their window.

Out selling balut in the streets of the mainland, her husband Arnaldo, 29, sensed that the weather might take a turn for the worse and hurried home to the island to warn his family.

At past midnight, the flood waters had seeped into their house, up to their ankles. “We were hearing people outside screaming ‘Tabang! (Help)’ so we decided to evacuate because we were afraid the house would not be able to withstand the flood,” Arnaldo recalled.

Arnaldo shepherded the children out, along with Helen’s mother, 66-year-old Purificacion, but when they opened the door, onrushing waves met them.

Arms linked together, they sought refuge at a relative’s two-story house with concrete foundations and wooden walls. As the water rose quickly, they, along with  neighbors, climbed the roof and hung on to each other, the children distributed among the adults.

They thought the flood water would not be strong enough to knock over the house, but just then, another house being carried by the current plowed into them, splitting the house and scattering those perched on its rooftop in different directions.

“I just hung on. I got snarled by a coconut tree and I hugged the trunk,” Helen said. She recalled how horrified she had been when she saw a log rolling into Hana. The other children, except Mike Herald, had been thrown out of sight.

From his vantage point, Arnaldo, who had found a precarious foothold on another tree, said he could see Mike Herald as he was being dragged forward by the muddy waves.

The boy, he said, had grabbed a clump of weeds to stop getting tossed by the water. But his shirt got tangled up with the branch of a huge ipil-ipil tree.

Arnaldo said he had watched in horror as the tree started rolling until the boy fell out of view.

Helen and Arnaldo were eventually reunited several meters away from their house. As they looked around at the flattened plain of brown that used to be their village, they guessed the terrible fates of their children, as well as Purificacion, who has not been found. They were prepared for the worst.

“We thought they had all died,” Helen said, her voice breaking.

Then Helen heard a familiar young voice calling out from a tree that was lodged into another some distance away.

“Ma, get me. I am hungry,” the boy had demanded. The muddy water below had not yet subsided and he could not get down.

Arnaldo swam to the tree and towed him to shore. Helen rushed to Mike Herald and gave him a good hug. “We were so relieved that one of them is still alive,” Helen said.

But their joy was short-lived. They soon found Shein and Aldrein at a funeral parlor, one of several they visited in this city of 300,000.

The two other children and Helen’s mother are still missing, among the more than 400 unaccounted for in the city, according to Mayor Lawrence Cruz. The death toll in Iligan, as of Tuesday, had reached just below 300, he said.

“The other children could not have survived. They are four- and two-year-old, what hope could they have?” Helen said.

Mike Herald, a scrawny youth with a direct gaze and dreams of becoming a soldier, never learned to swim, nor did his mother and siblings.

Asked how he had been able to pull through, Helen said it was probably his steely determination to live. “He just never let go from that tree,” she said.

The Dela Gracias originally lived in Zamboanga del Sur but the birth of twins two years ago forced them to move in with relatives on the island to be better able to make ends meet.

At the moment, they are staying at an evacuation center in Barangay Sta. Filomena with no plans of ever returning to Bayug Island, whose population of more than 300 people is believed to have been drastically reduced after the storm.

“I doubt if you’ll find a family there who did not lose anyone,” Helen said, relating stories they heard of entire families who perished together on another part of the island. “Nothing is left on Bayug,” she said.