As we write, rescuers are digging for survivors and for bodies of persons who remained missing after they and their homes were gobbled up by part of the mountains of Naga City, Cebu, on Thursday.
In upland Barangay Tinaan, Naga City, and in neighboring areas, the terrain, loosened by sporadic rain, is still treacherous, still landslide-prone though the earth has claimed 29 lives and still hides scores more.
Somewhere in our hearts, we wish we could say such a tragedy — of men, women, and children being buried in a flash before their time on this side of life is up — happens only in movies.
We hold our breaths; we cross our fingers, hoping that emergency responders, each in one piece, may accomplish their heartbreaking mission, that survivors may yet be extricated from the ground, that families anxiously waiting may — if the worst is confirmed — have bodies to carry home, mourn, and properly entomb.
We take pride in our highlands; they are the kind of stuff of which many of our songs are made. In our national anthem, we sing of the hills where we feel our glorious liberty. But from now on, many of us will never again be able to look at a mountain the same way, whether in photographs or before our very eyes.
We cannot imagine the lamentation flowing from the guts of those who have lost loved ones, though in the works of lensmen — snaps of a mother and child locked in a final embrace before their final breath, of siblings frozen in gestures of shielding each other from rampaging soil — we have imbibed something of the bitter sorrow of the bereaved.
May we not leave anyone feeling forsaken. The time calls for faith and goodwill. Our prayers are being offered for the dead and for the ones they left behind; volunteerism and attentiveness are evident, attesting to Cebuanos’ will to save. This is how we begin ensuring that the harrowing deaths of Althea Siton, 4; Mark Lawrence Campanilla, 3; Nina Siton, 7; Michael Versales, 16; Crystal Jean Siton, 14, and of others among their families, friends, and neighbors shall not be for nought.
In the fragility of our best efforts against the greatness of the tragedy, the flimsiness of our sincerest condolences against the brutality of the looming wakes and burials, we shall find both the rage that hales to justice those who enabled the catastrophe and the wisdom that remembers the sacredness of our mother planet in whose bosom we are but frail flowers, at risk of being crushed wherever we imperil her for profit.
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