Friday, December 03, 2004

Personal dreams

REAL, Quezon — Richard Seles, a kainginero (slash-and-burn farmer), struggled to keep tears at bay as he frantically dug a shallow grave for his infant son with a small shovel on a mountain pass.

Lying on the muddy ground was a small wooden box wrapped tightly in plastic containing his son, his second child, who was stillborn at the height of a landslide on Wednesday.

The baby was also named Richard.   The 37-year-old father had hoped to send him to university so he could help the small family earn a decent living instead of cutting down trees in the hills and growing small plots of vegetables.

“He was my boy.   I had wanted him to become successful.   I had a lot of dreams for him.   But the mountain has claimed him,” Seles told Agence France-Presse as he sadly watched soldiers lower the coffin into the shallow grave.

“That will only be a dream now.”

Other villagers had also buried three bodies dug out from under tons of rubble.   Their identities were unknown.

A deadly cocktail of mud, floodwater and boulders had crashed into Seles’ hillside home in the village of Tanawan near this town east of Manila on Wednesday as his young wife was in labor.

Extreme fear, exhaustion and the roaring, thunder-like scream of the moving ground had brought the baby on weeks before its due date, Seles said.

“She was terrified and it’s the mountain that caused her to go into labor prematurely,” said Seles, a small wiry man who has been farming the Sierra Madre mountain range looming above Real for decades.

“It is God’s will.   I haven’t seen anything quite like it before.”

“We were lucky to be alive,” he said, adding that his wife was being cared for by his other child, a 10-year-old girl, in a safer place further up the highway.

He said he would return to recover his son’s body from the shallow pit when the weather clears.   His only landmark for the grave is a small guava tree that had survived strong winds overnight.

Tractors and bulldozers were nearby struggling to clear debris that had blocked the main highway to the center of town, where many more bodies were believed lying in a state of decomposition after floods.

As Seles grieved over his son, men and women were digging through mud where three people were believed to have been buried.

Real and the nearby towns of Infanta and General Nakar were the worst hit by storms that battered Luzon Island in recent days.   It is a region of about 110,000 people, which accounted for nearly 90 percent of the estimated 600 dead or missing.

The mountain highway to Real remained blocked by huge boulders that had been washed down by floods.   In one section near Seles’ home, half of the road had turned into an unstable cliff strewn with logs.

Water cascading from the slopes had transformed a brook into swollen rapids.

Soldiers and journalists struggling to reach the town center by road passed by a small brick house perilously overhanging a cliff.

But the family refused to leave.   “We don’t have anywhere else to go anyway and inside it’s still warm,” said the father, who refused to give his name, but offered everyone boiled cassava rootcrops.

Seles blames lumber companies, which allegedly operate illegally on the mountain for the disaster.

“What I can say is that it is illegal.   Please stop it.   People are dying,” he said, but was quick to defend slash-and-burn farmers who only farm a small portion of the mountain.

“We only farm to live and eat.   Not to destroy the mountain.”


--AFP