Lost souls haunt the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (Naia), where they wait for flights that never come and loved ones who never redeem their promises.
Thin and frail-looking, they walk among passengers and staff at the Naia terminal’s public areas, a subject of curiosity among people who often avoid them for fear of what their unstable minds might compel them to do.
Most of these “lost souls” have been turned over to the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) or their families, but for some reason they gravitate back to the country’s premier airport to resume their wait for non-existent flights and people.
Erlina, 48, has been waiting at the Naia terminal 1 for some five years now for her Japanese employer to keep his promise and return for her. Or so she says.
Waitress
Erlina said she worked as a waitress in Japan for a year, from 1994 to 1995, and in Palau from 1996 to 1999. When she returned to the country, she got married. Everything’s been a confused mess after that, she told the Inquirer.
“When we managed to reach her relatives in Meycauayan, Bulacan, they said that Erlina got depressed after her husband left her and took their three kids with him,” an airport cleaning woman told the Inquirer.
It was after that when Erlina started going to the airport, waiting for a “Mr. Sato” to take her back to Japan. The notes, which she asked the airport cleaners to send through text to “Mr. Sato,” grew in frequency and length through time, with some of them complaining about people who allegedly wanted her dead after they had deprived her of hard-earned money.
The public affairs office of the Manila International Airport Authority (MIAA-PAO) assisted and turned over Erlina to the DSWD twice, first in 2014 and a second time last year, but she returned to the terminal shortly after, division chief Connie Bungag said.
Bungag said the lost and wandering souls at the Naia, “have some attachment to the airport. They were either former overseas workers or they have family members who were OFWs and left them.”
Notorious habit
Another lost soul is “Rosa,” who has the notorious habit of borrowing money with the promise of paying it back as soon as members of her family arrived. But they never did.
Rosa often stayed at the east wing of the departure area just outside the Terminal 1 gate. She said she hails from Leyte and is waiting for her family, who now lives in Cavite, to fetch her. She claims her husband works as an OFW in the US.
Asked how old she is, she claimed to be just 37, and said she looks about 20 years older because she was being hexed.
“I’m always here because I’m waiting for my family. We’re going some place where they are going to give us P5 million,” she explained, but would not say where they were going because it was a “secret.”
Another regular at the Naia Terminal 1 is “Beth,” a former teacher from Iloilo in her 60s who is fixated with actor Jake Cuenca who, she maintains, had promised to marry her.
No. 1 fan
Beth has been known to throw fits whenever people teased her about Cuenca. Her most precious possession is a jacket that he allegedly gave her.
She claimed that her husband, an engineer working in Singapore, left her because he found out about her “relationship” with the actor.
According to Bungag, Beth’s family had fetched her from the airport several times and brought her home to Iloilo. But a week later, she was back and has since become a perennial sight at the airport.
Another lost soul is a Caucasian man, nationality unknown, who usually stays at a corner on the westside of the departure area. He is generally harmless but has been known to growl at anyone who approaches him. Asked what he was doing at the airport, he growled that his Filipino girlfriend had robbed him of everything and that he wanted to go home. Offered something to eat, he dismissed it with a snort and slept in his corner.
Two other lost souls barely spoke to people. One frequently pushes a trolley piled with luggage and approaches persons randomly to ask when the President was coming because he had allegedly promised to take her with him abroad.
The other slept outside the Naia Terminal 1 complex, carrying plastic bags of her stuff. She sleeps most of the time and hardly resists whenever airport security personnel shoo her away.
Let them be
Security guard Jeffrey Tapalla at Terminal 3 said that two other women roamed the arrival area of the airport and that they let them be because they never attacked anyone and mostly kept to themselves. “They would return empty pushcarts left haphazardly by passengers and often helped maintenance personnel keep the premises clean,” he said.
Tapalla added that he hardly sees these “lost souls” now, since those who roam the airport’s public areas and seem to be of unfit mind are immediately turned over to the social worker at Barangay 183 in Villamor, Pasay City.
The airport police department meanwhile assists “lost souls” and brings them home if the address is just within Metro Manila, according to the MIAA-PAO chief. Those who live outside the city are referred to the DSWD, Bungag said.
“You have to pity them because for some reason or another, they are attached to the airport,” she added. “You want to help them return to their families instead of seeing them slowly wither.”
Almost skin and bones, Erlina would smile pleasantly and ask “Uwi ka na? (Are you going home?),” addressing homebound airport workers who have become familiar to her in all her years of staying at the airport. She would then return to her corner at Terminal 1 to patiently wait for her employer on the phantom plane that never comes. TVJ