now i don't want to be all emotional writing about this, or overeacting. but Benguet Mission is a life-changing experience for me.
Benguet is a province in the Philippines located at the Mountain Province. It sits above and below mountain ranges and is very famous among miners and gold diggers for its gold and other expensive minerals. Through the years, people exploited the land through hard core mining and logging and you can tell that the mountains could only take just about enough.
View of the once glorious mountain ranges during our drive back home.
Today, Benguet is gripped with tragedies of landslides and mudslides. People here and there die. The latest tragedy was when Typhoon Pepeng (international name: Parma) ravaged the Philippines last October. It left hundreds of people dead and thousands homeless. During that time, when Operation Blessing sent a medical team to a landslide-hit area, people were like walking zombies. They didn't know what it was exactly that hit them. It was like the angel of death did a passover in Benguet and killed those who didn't have the blood on their door posts (just like during Moses' time when all the first born died. In this case, every member of the family died).
Five months later, this March, we went back and visited the tent city in La Trinidad.
(Top) The tents where the displaced families are now living. Tents were given by the United Nations.
(Below) The strawberry farm field where some the of the people living in the tent cities temporarily work,
just until they could get back up on their feet again.
That is where the victims lived after their houses got buried in the landslides. Along with more than 20 families, the people share bathrooms and sinks. Some worked in the nearby strawberry farmfield since their source of livelihood got buried as well.
During the ocular, we met up with Ruthanna Uy. She is the program coordinator of the Women of Hope, the radio program where the 5 minute segment we're producing is a part of.
me (center) with Ruthanna and Paji. We're looking at the once town of Little Tibungan which was wiped away by the landslide.
She served as our tour guide and she led us around Baguio and La Trinidad where the victims lived. In almost every part of the city that has a patch of scraped mud, it happened to be places where the mudslides passed through.
Here and there, she pointed to me the places where the landslides happened and where the recovered dead bodies were placed during the rescue operations. The woman heading the National Disaster Coordinating Council in Benguet told us that the typhoon hit Benguet twice. What was surprising was that the death toll on the second hit was way higher than the first, to think that the people should have been more cautious. They hypothesized that too much rainfall caused the soil to erode, which led to the monstrous landslides.
Ruthanna told me all these depressing stories:
- during the rescue operations, majority of the people who died were rescuers. they were washed away by the strong currents. it didn't help that the soil was soft.
- a father brought his family out of the house because pf the landslide. they could hear the sound of the coming landslide and they rushed to a waiting shed to temporarily take shelter. unfortunately, the mud came sliding down the main road, burying them. they were recovered huddled to one another. only the baby was recovered down the hill, probably because the father accidentally dropped him. when friends and family members went to see the state of the house, it was not at all affected by the landslide and is still standing until this day.
- experts found food on the mouth of many of the bodies recovered. they estimated that the landslide occurred during dinner time.
- one landslide wiped away a whole town, leaving 70 families dead - others unrecovered.
It was only a one day ocular. But I left feeling heavy hearted and the giddy idea of seeing Baguio again after how many years quickly evaporated. The stench of death was still in the air. In spite of the 5 months that have already gone by, within those months, zombies suddenly turned into mourners as the gravity of the tragedy started to dawn on them.
It's on times like this that the song "The hills are alive....." will sound with mourning.