My story of "firsts' at Saint Bernard (First of two parts)

It was like being deep in a foreign land or worse in another planet. That was my first impression upon seeing the devastation in Saint Bernard, Southern Leyte as I leapfrogged through the rocks to avoid falling into the waist-deep mud.

The Saint Bernard coverage was my very first out-of-town assignment, and my first time in Southern Leyte. It was my first time to be in a tragedy of such magnitude and, most of all, my first time to be away from my wife and two kids for several days.

It was midday on Friday when news of the Saint Bernard tragedy crept into the newsroom. The reports were yet sketchy but there were feeds that thousands were buried by landslide (or rockslide mixed with mud as I recall seeing it from the site) from a mountain in barangay Guinsaugon.

The FREEMAN News Editor Quennie Bronce asked me if I could go to Saint Bernard impromptu to get first-hand information of the tragic incident there. I didn't hesitate.

Assigned to go with me was Paul Jun Rosaroso, The FREEMAN photojournalist, who I found having an uncanny dexterity in taking good pictures with his camera on the left hand while holding an umbrella on the other (at the site, you bet!).

At past 10 p.m. that Friday, we took a ship for Hilongos where we arrived 1:30 a.m. the following day (pretty fast for that type of a domestic ferry). We immediately took a bus that was supposed to bring us to Saint Bernard town, a few hours later.

But at past 3 a.m., upon reaching barangay Lipanto (they said was the boundary of Saint Bernard), the bus stopped after people in every vehicle that came past us on the other side warned us not to proceed because the road ahead was dangerous.

Paul and I decided to get off the bus and we walked further ahead to check if the warnings were true. It was still dark (but thanks I bought a flashlight when we left Cebu) and we saw motorcycle-for-hire, or habal-habal, drivers arriving and offering us a ride to Saint Bernard. But for how much? It was P250 per passenger.

It was too costly so we dropped the habal-habal ride to save our money. We decided instead to hitch a ride with the GMA-TV news team, led by reporter Sandra Aguinaldo, which was on a big truck with all the TV crew gear and everything else.

But we changed our mind later upon seeing that the TV crew's truck got stuck along the way also together with the rescue convoy from the cities of Maasin and Ormoc, among other local governments.

So we proceeded with our hike, and we saw a lone payloader trying to pull a passenger bus from the muddy road, with another ambulance waiting its turn to be "rescued." We then figured that the estimated 10-km distance to the town proper, through this road condition, was a bad idea.

So, we decided to ask the Maasin City Bureau of Fire Protection crew, whose vehicle was just next to the stuck ambulance, if we could hitch a ride. Actually it was already an alternate route since the paved road fell several hundred meters into a ravine some days earlier, a fireman told me. We called it then as "The road to nowhere."

Riding on the fire truck, we finally arrived Saint Bernard past 6 a.m., along with Cebu-based reporter Mars Mosqueda of the Manila Bulletin (Thanks to FO1 Bryan Franza of Ormoc BFP for lending us their fire coats to shield us from the downpour at the time).

At the town proper, people were frantically busy, running here and there. Paul and I went to the evacuation area, near the municipal hall, where the Guinsaugon survivors were taken. We got to work immediately on our coverage of the event.

Cartons, old blankets, dirty and muddied slippers, and dishes littered the place. But what hit me most were the tired and stunned eyes of people there, like asking an invisible being what went wrong.

I asked some of the survivors and what they narrated caught me in disbelief. Some of them were in tears telling how they managed to survive but will have to deal with the reality that they also lost everything, including their loved ones, in a snap of a finger so to speak. One of them was Federico Garcia who, along with his wife Bernadette and three children survived the crumbling tons of mud and rocks from the mountain but lost one child and 50 other relatives.

Saint Bernard Mayor Maria Lim allowed us to leave our bags inside her office upon telling her that we will go to the site of the landslide, some seven kilometers away. We had our brunch first and people from the DSWD were very kind to offer us a can of sardines and a plate of rice.

Rumors spread that survivors inside the buried Guinsaugon Elementary School building have sent text messages to their kin, prompting rescuers to start early in the morning and find the school.

Going to the site was very difficult as we clung unto the payloader, the only means of transportation that can cross the 50- to 80-meter wide Lawigan River. Reaching the riverbank, we plodded though another course of knee-deep mud for about 500 meters until we reached the place of crushed houses.

During the trek, Paul didn't wear his leather shoes reasoning that it would be easier to negotiate the mud that way. He was wrong, of course, because after just a few ploughs through the mud I heard him saying, "bay, di mosilbe akong P700 worth nga Adidas tsinelas diri."

He managed a few more steps but his sandals were eventually left deep in the groin-deep mud. He had second thoughts asking Mosqueda for help to get him out of the mud. He told me that before helping him, Mosqueda will most likely take pictures first of him mud-stuck and be on the front pages the next day.

(To be continued)