Mythical ‘aswang’ won’t destroy human spirit

I grew up in Laguna with a fascinating thought that I am an aswang descent.

My late grandfather was from Aklan and had relatives across Capiz, which are both known for stories of the flesh-eating creatures. My mother used to say that our relatives were aswang, too, but that was just her way of shutting me up as child when I wanted so much to set foot on Boracay.

I am now too old to believe it and my mother could not even remember anymore where these supposed aswang relatives of ours were when I headed to Capiz for a week’s coverage of Supertyphoon Yolanda’s aftermath.

But it was not hard to believe the stories again, just by seeing the ruins left by Yolanda when it pummeled Panay Island on November 8. Capiz and Aklan, my mother’s home provinces, looked as if these had been under attack by some supernatural beings.

There were no winged ghouls, of course, but monstrous winds that shrilled and howled for hours and peeled open the roofs of houses, schools and churches.

In Capiz, one resident likened the sound of the wind to dogs fighting. Another said it sounded like an airplane hovering right above their heads.

In Dumarao town, 42.87 kilometers from Roxas City, the winds snatched away a baby, like how the fetus-sucking tiktik the stories said would have.

Sandy Gonzaga, Dumarao’s disaster response officer, said the child’s mother placed the 2-month-old in a cloth hammock fastened to the roof’s ceiling. But the roof was blown off and the child was found dead, 30 meters away from the house.

How I wish it was just part of the myth.

Deadline

It is said that a person is an aswang when you look into his eyes and find your own reflection upside down. But I didn’t see mine at all, or maybe because I looked away, in an instinct that this old woman before me was about to cry.

I met her in Olotayan, an island village about 45 minutes by boat from Roxas. The village captain, Manuel Aninang, brought in relief packs from relatives and kababayan, that day.

I was not paying much attention to what the captain was announcing, in the local language, when this woman in the crowd suddenly threw me a hug. She clutched my hand and said something in Hiligaynon, which I did not understand, until Aninang later explained that she was thankful I was there and I meant to write about their community.

The island village was running low on food and water supply days after the typhoon.

Aninang said the people received very little attention from the government and the island was virtually cut off after most of their boats, their only means to the mainland, were destroyed.

It was past noon when we headed back to the city and the village captain asked me to join them for lunch. I turned down the invitation because I had to rush back and file the story and that woman only made me want to meet my deadline, tight it might be for me.

Human spirit

Aklan and Capiz were hit just as bad as the other provinces in central Philippines. But in less than week after the typhoon, most people already left the evacuation centers and returned to their houses or to what was left of the structures. They also returned to their work.

One day after an interview in Pontevedra town, Marvin de Honor, the tricycle driver that I had hired, asked me if we could make a quick stop in his house in the village of Sublangon.

“We are already here,” he said, and I had to stop myself from blurting out “where,” when I realized he was referring to what used to be the roof of a hut, but now only a couple of feet above the ground. His wife and children had to duck when they came out to meet me.

It rained in Capiz that night and the night after that. But De Honor would still show up early in the morning, just like the attendants at the inn where I stayed, or the social workers, whose own houses were also damaged by the typhoon.

If indeed it was an aswang, it may have taken lives, tore down the houses and demoralized the people. But it may never destroy human spirit.