A thick black smoke that came from the burning houses at Barangay Suba at the back of Pasil fish market blows out on the sky. (CDN PHOTO/JUNJIE MENDOZA)
Lita Rabanes, 53, had a very simple wish for this Christmas — for her four children and their spouses and her eight grandchildren to be together on Christmas eve sharing a modest meal.
“Mag-spaghetti, mag-sandwich ug mag-juice unta mi. Wa man mi sapi, so mao unta ‘to amoang plano. Nag-save na mi adlaw adlaw, tag diyes diyes, para sa pag-abot sa Pasko, amoang pundukon aron among ikumpra. Ang sobra among ipalit og sagol sa spaghetti,” Lita told Cebu Daily News.
(We were planning to prepare spaghetti, make sandwiches and have juice. We don’t have enough money, so we planned to save ten pesos daily so that when Christmas comes, we will pool all that we saved to go grocery shopping (for juice and bread). The rest we will use to buy the ingredients for spaghetti.)
But having even this simple meal for noche buena (Christmas eve celebration) is no longer possible, said Lita.
“Napakyas man kay nasunog (The fire spoiled that plan now).”
Lita, holding back tears, said her Christmas wish disappeared the moment her home in Barangay Suba, Cebu City, turned into ashes.
At high noon on Tuesday, November 22, all her excitement of a happy family get-together on Christmas eve had been doused by a fire that was started by a tiny flame from a matchstick. A little kid in her neighborhood allegedly played with matches and accidentally ignited their mattress, causing a fire that left 861 persons, including those from the Rabanes family, homeless.
Fire victims temporarily sheltered at the Barangay Suba Sports Complex. (CDN PHOTO/DOMINIC YASAY)
With all their valuables reduced to a rubble, Lita, her eight little grandchildren, four children and their partners — who all lived in the same house — had nothing left except for a few clothes donated by relatives. They are among the 861 persons from 214 families who are now squeezed inside a temporary shelter, the Suba Sports Complex.
Lights off
The light seemed to have gone out from the face of Lita Rabanes as she mumbled, at loss for words on how to build their lives all over again.
“Naa ra mi diri, maghulat og hinabang … hantod sa hinay hinay nga makasugod (We will just be here, waiting for help to come … until we can gradually start again),” Lita said with a sad smile.
Lita, like the other fire victims in Suba, are now pinning their hope on the promise of Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña that he will give them materials that will allow them to start rebuilding their houses.
Lita and the other fire victims in Sitio Wakwak, Barangay Suba, an extremely dense community, are beneficiaries of the city’s Slum Improvement and Resettlement (SIR) project and thus could rebuild their homes.
“Restoring is more the word. It is already designed for the urban poor under the SIR. We will have to restore that,” the mayor had said.
It was not the first time that Rabanes experienced the horrors of a fire incident.
When she was just a little girl of about five, their house at Sitio Lawis in Barangay Pasil was also burned to the ground one morning in 1968 when a nearby warehouse of an appliance store in Carbon market caught fire. The fire quickly spread to two neighboring barangays, rendering over 100 families homeless.
“We were also not able to save anything at that time,” she recalled.
She said rebuilding their lives after the fire had been bearable since the Cebu City government then donated a land to the fire victims located in Barangay Suba, the same land now under SIR.
Residents of Barangay Suba flee from the burning house. (CDN PHOTO/LITO TECSON)
Along with the other fire victims, Rabanes said her parents immediately built a hut made of lightweight materials like plywood and local hardwood.
“It was a marshy land, the land donated to the fire victims, and everyone who intend to put up a house there had to fill the land with rocks and sand so the land would firm up,” Rabanes recalled in Cebuano.
Burden of a parent
But that incident is totally different from today.
Then, Lita was a child cared for and comforted by her mother and father.
Now, she has to be strong for her big family as she assumed both roles of a mother and father to her children and grandchildren, since after her husband passed away seven years ago.
Lita said she used to sell fruits and spices at the Carbon market, but she was not able to sustain it due to lack of capital and her body being bogged down by diseases like hypertension and diabetes.
Her children, she lamented, don’t have stable jobs, which is why rebuilding their house on their own is almost next to impossible.
“We are really grateful that DSWS (Department of Social Welfare and Services) donated ten pieces of plywood and ten pieces of tin roof. But we still need hollow blocks and cement (to build the foundation). On top of that, we have to get a carpenter, and we don’t have money for that,” she said.
With the future now seeming bleak, Rabanes said she can only pray that she will still have enough strength to start all over again.
Disclaimer: The comments uploaded on this site do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of management and owner of Cebudailynews. We reserve the right to exclude comments that we deem to be inconsistent with our editorial standards.
