When I told my bellicose and history-conscious cousin, the architect Toti Mendoza, that I was going to Tacloban, capital city of Leyte, he proclaimed: “Good! Will send you excerpts of how MacArthur’s staff treated Sergio Osmeña.”
On the day a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck Cebu and Bohol, these islands landed in the Top 5 Islands in Asia list of Conde Nast Traveler magazine.
On November 5, Eight Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration from Baybay and Maasin in Leyte will leave Manila for Paderborn, Germany, where the beatification of their founder, Venerable Mother Maria Theresia Bonzel, will take place on Nov. 10.
About 100 fashion designers, models will come together under the joint direction of Jackie Aquino and Robby Carmona to stage a fashion fundraiser for the devastated provinces of Leyte and Samar.
This past week, we have seen pictures of tragedy, the specter of death and the face of despair. The images are impossible to ignore. It is difficult to find words to describe the horror that thousands lived through when “nature went crazy.”
Three days after Supertyphoon “Yolanda” wreaked havoc across the country, we waited for any word from my husband’s family in Tacloban. We scanned the news channels, local and foreign, to know the situation in Leyte. And because the news was grim, we worried about my sister-in-law, her husband, their children and grandchildren.
NOV. 15: My neighbor’s housekeeper had been despondent for days, sleepless and unable to eat, with the news that her eldest son, who is 19 years old, had disappeared without a trace in the eye of the Tacloban storm. She had planned to make the 22-hour trip by bus to try to find him over the weekend.
How Eastern Samar and most of Leyte look like today found a haunting musical equivalent in an Antonio Molina composition, “Oras Mangitngit” (Dark Hours), interpreted by a distinguished soprano from Leyte, Salvacion Oppus Yniguez.
It’s been three weeks since “Yolanda” swept away his parents, and Aaron is now talking like a reporter—narrating facts in an almost clinical manner, his description so detailed that it brings you to the scenes of devastation in Palo where his family is from, and in Tacloban where his parents died.
This story ends with a family reunion. But it revolves around a man who made the reunion possible—by hand-carrying 18 liters of diesel to destinations guided only by cell phone numbers, in the chaos and trauma following Supertyphoon “Yolanda’s” destruction of the Visayas.
