When typhoon Haiyan spared our ancestral home

Napo Beach Resort in Maripipi Island, Biliran province.
Every time the spirit of Christmas hovers around the corner, I feel the surge of excitement rushes through my spine.

And the anxiety is more felt as I look back at the years I was with my loved ones during the Yuletide Season. I'm used to being away so many times before because I knew right from the start that I'd be able to withstand the pains and the rigors of the long detachment. I felt a little of remorse that I wans't one of those
whose families were devastated by Supertyphoon Haiyan (Yolanda) that transformed the areas of Eastern and Western Visayas in the Philippines into vast carpet of wastelands. Consequently, more than 6,000 people, including children, died. Alone, Tacloban City, once a bastion of commercial business in Eastern Visayas, being its booming capital, is now a ghost town and so with other areas in the suburbs of Leyte province.

I was raised in one of the paradise islands close to Biliran province, once the sub-province of Leyte. When I heard over The Filipino Channel (TFC) that typhoon Haiyan made its first landfall in Guian, Eastern Samar, and then Tacloban City on its way to Western Visayas, I felt ecstatic and fear had swarmed all over my body. With the magnitude of the typhoon at more than 300 kph, everything on its path would be destroyed, I thought to myself.  True to reports, the wrath that typhoon Haiyan brought to the Philippines was so far the strongest and the most destructive the world has ever known.

With that in mind, how could our ancestral home in that island paradise withstand the blows of the super typhoon? This was the question that played in my mind as I contemplated on what to do next. Although I left the island many years ago, I still have a lot of relatives over there who consider it their home. And why
would I worry when I'm far apart? As a matter of fact, that ancestral home served as my abode for so many years. It was in this wooden structure that gave me sanctuary for most of my young life, and so with my younger siblings. I was worried, too, what our neighbors would say when it's toppled down, and nobody in
the family circle would even lift a finger to chip in something to rebuild it when it's down to the ground.

If I'm not mistaken, the house was built before the onset of the Second World War. It's architectural design alone would tell that it was built, perhaps, during the last decade of the Spanish occupation in the Philippines. Except for the foundation, everything was made of first class wooden materials like narra, among others. But as it aged through the years, even the metals would be no match to the negative effects of rusting. How much more for the wooden materials used for the structure?

Surprisingly, I got a text message from my younger brother who is now a barangay official in the island to convey the message that the house remained standing despite the onslaughts. I asked my brother how and why? It was only after he explained to me one of the reasons why our ancestral home survived the
super typhoon.

"What?" I asked.

According to him, typhoon Haiyan veered away after it completely washed out Tacloban City through the storm surges that rose to at least 10 meters high as the eye of the storm headed straigth towards the direction of Iloilo and Negros provinces. When I was a small kid, my late grandma would tell me a story many
centuries ago that the island was spared from a super typhoon that brought with it huge waves after an Angel suddenly appeared from the sky to pacify the storm with his sword. The Angel stood where the Catholic Church now stands. That's why the annual fiesta celebration was named in honor of Angel Archangel.

Until now, I couldn't believe to myself if the story is true or not. But what I sinscerely believed right now is that sometimes "luck" and "prayers" play a vital role in miracles. That's how I perceived things as they when I learned that our ancestral home was spared from going down. Otherwise, my bitter and sweet
memories in that ancestral home would be buried to the ground forever. Thanked God, it didn't happen.

Happy New Year to all the survivors of Super typhoon Haiyan and may 2014 brings you all good tidings!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Opening of public lands for agri-developments

Image
For many decades, vast tracts of forest lands are damaged across the Philippines. These are either the handiwork of nature like soil erosions, landslides, tremors or they're simply man-made due to humans' greed for immediate cash if only to survive. By all means, those who are within the proximity of the forests are free to do whatever they thought was best for them to survive or earn fast cash.  Notably, the most common practice that upland dwellers do is the cutting of firewood, slash-and-burn farming to plant crops even if these activities run counter to established forestry regulations that forbid them from doing these activities without permission from the authorities. Without a land of their own, they have to do it anyway. While some armed groups would simply engage themselves in illegal logging activities for profits. Forestry reports said that they even encroach on other's logging concessions to cut trees for sale to interested buyers. When I was working with the Mi
Read more

China is to blame for the pandemic spread

Image
Had the Chinese government taken the initiative or done enough to immediately contain the novel Coronavirus from spreading waywardly into other areas, this pandemic wouldn't have gone too far to pester other countries like Italy, the United States and the Philippines whose governments had declared a lockdowns thus causing extreme fears among the people, not to mention the derailments of some economies worldwide. But the provincial government, where Wuhan is an integral part of, acted too late to lockdown the place. The local government in Wuhan should have prevented residents from getting out, especially those who were infected by the virus. Sorry to say this, but the Wuhan government officials were lackadaisical in their approach to the health dilemma, thinking that the problem was just an ordinary matter which didn't require much attention. Until the problem got worse resulting to some deaths in the area had they known of Covid-19's serious impacts on the health of innoce
Read more