3 Quezon municipalities rise from ‘muddy graves’

INFANTA, Quezon – It’s now popularly called here as REINA.

It stands for Real, Infanta, Nakar – three Quezon towns facing the Pacific Ocean in Luzon’s eastern seaboard.

But more than its acronym, REINA has evolved into a symbol of the Filipino’s much-ballyhooed resiliency.

Three years ago last Nov. 29, millions of cubic meters of timber, logs, and uprooted trees, together with about 20,000 metric tons of mountain soil, were swept by rampaging floodwaters from the Sierra Madre mountain range down to the Quezon and Aurora towns along the Pacific Ocean.

These and the overflowing turbulent waters of the ocean created a giant whirlpool that turned into the muddy and watery graves of countless people, including those in the seaside town of Dingalan up north in Aurora.

The University of the Philippines Los Baños-College of Forestry and Natural Resources (UPLB-NCFR) later averred that the catastrophe was “caused by the interplay of geological, climatological, biophysical, and socioeconomic factors… Nevertheless, the loss of vegetation due to legal and illegal logging is clearly one of the major contributory factors to the calamity.”

The exact number of casualties of the deluge has yet to be known. But the initial figures are grim.

Statistics provided The STAR by the Social Action Center (SAC), a Church-based, non-stock, non-profit organization operating at the Prelature of Infanta, showed that 294 lost their lives in Nakar.

But Mayor Leovigildo Ruzol told this writer that there must be more, perhaps close to a thousand, since many have yet to be accounted for.

The same is true with Infanta, where, according to Mayor Filipina Grace America, 176 perished. To this day, many are still missing.

In Real town south of here, SAC reported the number of dead at 229.

The exact number of casualties in Dingalan also has yet to be ascertained.

Moreover, thousands of houses were battered beyond repair.

As councilman Diony Tena of Barangay Boboin, Infanta, said in an interview with The STAR, in the bottom of the Pacific Ocean off their community, still lie the shattered remnants of many homes swept into the sea. And perhaps, he added, the remains of some missing residents of Boboin.

We were in the REINA area last Dec. 5-6 to witness the field day for the project “Developing and Testing a Modality for Rehabilitation of Calamity-stricken Areas.”

The activity was organized and sponsored by SAC under the Prelature of Infanta headed by Bishop Rolando Tria Tirona, UP Los Baños headed by Chancellor Luis Rey Velasco, and the Los Baños-based Department of Science and Technology-Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources Research and Development (DOST-PCARRD) under executive director Patricio Faylon.

Though not much like what they used to be, the communities hit by the catastrophe are gradually but consistently rising from the muddy whirlpool that they were plunged into because of man-made and nature-aggravated destruction of the natural environment and resources.

And to the people in the REINA area, the project now being undertaken by SAC, UPLB, PCARRD, and cooperating agencies is “hulog ng langit (God-sent).”

At best, optimistically stressed Infanta Mayor America, a UP Los Baños alumna (1978), the catastrophe was “a blessing in disguise.”

Speaking at a forum held at the Boboin chapel last Dec. 6, the woman mayor said the calamity steeled the will of the people and developed in them a coping mechanism to weather the harsh realities.

In response, the municipal government has also chartered a disaster mitigation program that has become a model for other local government units.

Last Nov. 29 the catastrophe’s third anniversary, the Infanta municipal government launched a book entitled “Infanta: A Journey to Healing” celebrating the resiliency of its people.

For instance, it has been broached that Infantans living in places below sea level should abandon their communities and settle in higher areas, America said. But they stood their ground, and instead instilled in their inner selves the will to cope with calamities.

The centerpiece of the SAC-UPLB-DOST/PCARRD project is Barangay Boboin, once a major source of rice for Quezon and one of the worst hit by the catastrophe.

Before the calamity, back-to-back killer typhoons “Yoyong” and “Winnie” lashed the Southern Tagalog region, triggering floods, dismembering trees, and scattering debris all over the fertile Boboin farmlands.

In the succeeding months, wild grasses lushly grew in the Boboin fields, making them unfit for rice production. In fact, said Faylon at a forum at Carmel School in Nakar, 10 months after the deluge, about 100 species of wild grasses carried to the lowlands by the floodwaters dominated the Boboin farms.

Following the catastrophe, SAC looked around for people and institutions that could help alleviate the victims’ sufferings.

The search brought SAC Deacon Mario Van Loon (a Dutch) of the Prelature of Infanta to the Los Baños Science Community.

Thus was born the project aptly titled “Developing and Testing a Modality for Rehabilitation of Calamity-stricken Areas,” which gathered the technologies and manpower expertise to help solve the problems in the REINA area.

Began in January 2006, the PCARRD-funded project aims “to develop a modality for rehabilitation of calamity-stricken areas that would ultimately rehabilitate badly damaged agricultural lands and establish sustainable integrated farming systems through multi-stakeholder partnership and client-oriented extension strategies.”

Today, Boboin farmlands are again a picture of productivity where rice, corn, peanut, and vegetables (tomato, eggplant, pechay, ampalaya, sitao, mustard) have brought back the hopes and dreams of the barangay residents.

The project proponents helped not only in the production of the food and cash crops, they also assisted in the location of markets for the villagers’ produce, attested Rolando Merto, Lucio Gurango, Manolito Astejada, and Inocencio de Leon, who gave their testimonials on how they were able to piece together again the shattered fragments of their lives.

Now, the next time the issue of Filipino resiliency is raised, remember REINA.