SAGBAYAN, BOHOL, Philippines – Sixty-six-year-old Isabel Magallanes, a resident at Barangay Canmano of this landlocked town, a few kilometers from the poblacion, was in her usual chore in a small lot planted with corn, when she suddenly heard a thunderous sound and felt the earth moving under her feet.
Magallanes, a widow, told The Freeman that she witnessed one of the so-called Chocolate Hills, near where she was standing in the middle of the corn field, collapsed to the ground.
“I saw it disintegrated with a thick smoke of dust as a result of the collapse,†she said in the local dialect. The crumbling Chocolate Hill looked like a brownish cake sliced in a clumsy way to expose the dirty-white limestone beneath, Magallanes said.
She narrated that she never saw that occurrence throughout her whole life in Canmano, where she was born and raised by her parents.
Upon realizing that it was an earthquake, she quickly looked for her 14-year-old grandchild, Jamael, who was also within the area of their house situated at the foot of a Chocolate Hill, about a few hundred of meters from where the other Hill collapsed.
Shortly after, the boy told her that he was also running fast to evade the few rocks rolling down from the Chocolate Hill coming his way.
She was thankful that her grandson, her only companion since her husband died in 2005, escaped unharmed by the raging boulders of the disintegrated Hill. She also thanked God that nothing happened to the two of them, even if the kitchen in her house was destroyed by the quake.
On a positive note, however, Magallanes said the crumbled Chocolate Hill has now become a public attraction. Almost everyone on vehicles, passing by the place, which is the only access to the interior part of the barangay, stops now for a photo shoot of the Chocolate Hill that caved in.
While being interviewed, she pointed at two motorcycle-riding men who were taking photos, one after the other, with the crumbled Chocolate Hill serving as their backdrop.
Sagbayan is one of three towns, the other are Carmen and Batuan, where most of the 1,268 Chocolate Hills are concentrated.
Magallanes, during the interview with The Freeman, was tending a sack of crushed stones to be used for construction by her customers. Besides corn farming, her other livelihood is “crushing stones†literally.
She said she was waiting for Pilo, the owner of a hardware, to haul her sacks of crushed stones that were already paid in advance. This back-breaking stone-crushing work earned for her P14 per can, she said.
Asked if she was hard-pressed for lack of foodstuff after the earthquake, she said not much although she also wanted to avail herself of the distributed relief goods for her and her grandson. (FREEMAN)