SCHOOL ANYMORE
[PHOTO - IPAD SHOTS: UN
humanitarian coordinator in the Philippines, Jacqui Badcock, (right) visits a
Muslim community along the Mandulog River in Iligan City on Monday. The Mandulog
village lies devastated after rampaging floodwaters carrying logs slammed the
community at the height of Tropical storm "Sendong" on Dec. 17. At left,
children take shelter from the rain during the relief operations conducted by
the UN team. RICHEL UMEL/INQUIRER
MINDANAO]
CAGAYAN DE ORO, JANUARY
4,
2012 (INQUIRER) By Bobby Lagsa, JB R. Deveza, Ryan
D. Rosauro Inquirer Mindanao - "Where are Jill Ann Rose Uriarte and Kent
Daniel 'KD' Ranalan?" is one question Grade 1 teacher Marilou Gambutan will have
a hard time answering.
Jill Ann and KD, Gambutan's pupils at the City Central School, died when
rampaging floodwaters wiped out their neighborhood in Sitio (sub village)
Cala-Cala in Barangay (village) Macasandig here two weeks ago.
"It is very difficult to tell the students that KD and Jill Ann won't be
coming back for good," said Gambutan, almost in tears.
"He used to make simple comments that he missed his mama so much," Gambutan
said of KD whose mother is an overseas Filipino worker.
Jill Ann was also special for Gambutan. "I would change her clothes when she
was sweating."
After the floods, Gambutan's husband accompanied Jill Ann's parents in
searching for her. "They went to Camiguin Island, to Iligan and every town in
between Iligan and Camiguin. They never found her," she said.
Gambutan said that some of her pupils had called her up and asked if KD and
Jill Ann had been found. "I cannot tell them. I just turned off my phone," she
said.
Edna Homillada, another teacher at the City Central School, also lost a Grade
1 pupil, Shamia Daclag, whose house in Isla de Oro was swept away by the flood.
Most amiable
Homillada said she would find it hard to tell her students that one of the
class' most amiable and behaved students was gone. "Shamia is now in the hands
of God, that is the best consolation we can have," the teacher said.
Homillada said that when the children started asking questions, she would
have to tell them gradually.
In Iligan City, education officials expect fewer children going back to
school today.
Living elsewhere
Apart from those who left the city with their parents to seek refuge in the
homes of relatives, some of the children and their families may have moved to
villages that are now far from the school where they used to attend classes.
Others died in the flooding.
"Expectedly, some may have settled with relatives outside of the city," said
Dr. Alice Engracia-Anghay, education supervisor and communication officer of the
Department of Education (DepEd)-Iligan Division.
Anghay said the resumption of classes after a long Yuletide break would be an
opportunity for DepEd to learn about the whereabouts of schoolchildren.
Classes resume on January 3 in schools spared from the floods and not used as
evacuation centers.
Learning tents
However, two-hour informal classes in "learning tents" will be held in eight
schools, which host flood evacuees, said Anghay.
"The education department has decided not to displace the evacuees for now.
We hope to provide them a sense of normalcy," she added.
The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Actions (Ocha) has
estimated that some 123,200 school children were among those affected by the
disaster in Iligan and Cagayan de Oro cities alone.
The United Nations Children's Emergency Fund said that children accounted for
half of the 250,000 people needing humanitarian aid.
Susan Perante, officer in charge of the Ubaldo Laya Elementary School in
Iligan, suggested that makeshift structures could be erected in remaining open
spaces of the schools-cum-evacuation centers.
These can serve as temporary lounging areas for the evacuees as they vacate
the classrooms. Perante proposed that the makeshift structures be made of
coconut lumber with tarpaulin as roofing material.
Stress debriefing
Students of the biggest public elementary school in Cagayan de Oro will begin
today a week-long psycho-social stress debriefing to be facilitated by Xavier
University psychologists.
But Shirley Merida, principal of the West City Central School in Barangay
Carmen, said the students would have to undergo sessions in the school's covered
court as its 96 classrooms were still being occupied by evacuees.
West City Central School has a total of 5,318 elementary students.
Merida said the school planned to hold the sessions and regular classes next
week, in learning tents beside the covered court if the families staying in the
covered court were unable to move by Tuesday.
Merida said the school had requested the city government to provide sacks for
the students to sit on. There will be no tables or chairs in the "learning
tents" so these can accommodate more students.
Teacher lost 3 kids
Of the 5,318 students, 678 have lost their notebooks, pencils, textbooks or
school uniforms to the floods, according to Merida.
She said that of the school's 140 teachers, 128 were also affected by the
flood. Still, all, except one, will be in school today.
"I already met with the teachers and many will be able to report for work,"
Merida said.
The teacher who asked to be excused from Tuesday's reopening of classes lost
three of her four children.
We had been warned of Cagayan River's fury By
Antonio J. Montalvan II Philippine Daily Inquirer
(Editor's Note: The author writes for the Inquirer's Opinion section.
He is a Mindanao anthropologist, historian, and educator, and is a member of the
national advisory board of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts.)
[PHOTO - AERIAL VIEW OF CAGAYAN DE ORO AND MISAMIS]
I was born in Cagayan de Oro, as were my parents and most of my ancestors.
The first of our forebears to settle here came in 1780.
This is the city of my roots. I thus know firsthand that Cagayan de Oro had
never been in the typhoon path. The only aberration historically recorded was in
January 1916, when my late father, who was born in 1903, experienced a severely
flooded Cagayan de Misamis, as the town was then called.
In what I call the Great Flood of 1916, the Cagayan River overflowed its
banks after three days of incessant rain. Many parts of the town had to be
traversed by small boats. Historical documents say there was a typhoon that also
ravaged the hinterlands bordering the montane plateaus beyond, known today as
Bukidnon province.
I grew up with the Cagayan River (not Cagayan de Oro River; the "de Oro" is a
recent appendage to the place named Cagayan and is not necessarily transferable
to the more ancient river's name).
The street that lined the bank was the main street of this town that was
founded in 1626 by Higaunon headman Datu Salangsang and the Portuguese-born
Recollect, Fray Agustin de San Pedro. In the Hispanic era up until the early
American years, this street was known as Camino de la Iglesia because it led to
the stone church built by the Augustinian Recollects in 1845.
Most of the old families of Cagayan de Misamis built their houses on this
street, later renamed Calle Burgos. Except for one, the Reyes-Roa-Chaves house,
all those huge and beautiful houses are now gone, looted and torched by the
invading Japanese on May 2, 1941.
Stray shark
The Cagayan River was truly the center of my childhood. Among the
family tales handed down to us was that of Dolores Margarita Corrales y Roa, a
sister of my paternal grandmother, bleeding to death on June 10, 1878, after
being bitten by a shark that had strayed into the river.
That should give us an idea how deep this great river was. In Spanish-era
maps, it was marked as navigable.
It was here that the trading boats of rich Cagayan merchants—Tirso Neri y Roa
and his cousin-wife Mercedes Roa, Ramon Chaves, and the wealthy bachelor Jose
Roa y Casas (who became Emilio Aguinaldo's first Filipino governor of Misamis in
1899)—docked and unloaded their goods to the almacenes, or stores stocked with
imported goods that lined the Camino.
Ramon Chaves and his family lived on the second floor of a huge house; the
ground floor was his almacen that bore the sign "La Fortuna de Ramon Chaves."
It was on the riverbank that, in 1882, a Chinese junk unloaded its cargo of
red bricks for the new house being built by Sia Ygua. The house is still
standing at the former Calle del Mar that leads to the sea. It now bears a
marker that the National Historical Commission installed in 2000, when Cagayan
commemorated its participation in the Philippine-American War of 1900.
So indelible was the river's influence on the culture of the town that the
Roa clan, to which both my parents belonged, was branched into two—the "Roa sa
tubig" (who lived riverside) and the "Roa sa ibabaw" (who lived on higher
ground).
My father descended from the former, and from the latter came my maternal
grandfather, Juan Roa, who became governor of an undivided Misamis.
Ateneo de Cagayan, today Xavier University, came from the former; its
original campus on the Camino was the ancestral house donated to the first
bishop, Santiago Hayes, SJ, by Zosimo Roa and his cousin-wife Conchita Roa Roa.
The time has come
Many times as a child, I witnessed the river swell after a heavy rain, but
just enough not to spill into our property line. Over many periods, I saw its
furious torrents on downcast days, but never cruel enough to engulf the
community.
My father, however, always warned that the time would come when the river
would unleash its rare fury, just as it did in 1916.
Little did we know that that time had come. There was no clear foreboding of
what happened at about 2:30 a.m. on Dec. 17, yet the writing on the wall had
been there.
In 1998, I came upon a study of Fernando P. Siringan of the University of the
Philippines' National Institute of Geological Sciences in Diliman. The study on
the sedimentation patterns and dispersal at Macajalar Bay where this river
empties showed aerial photographs that uncannily matched the old river beds that
my father had indicated.
Because they were alluvial deposits—silt and sand deposited by regular
flooding and tidal patterns—they appeared of a different, lighter color on the
black and white photographs compared to mainland soil.
What I found uncanny was how they matched with historical data. A layman
could easily see where the old river course was. Clearly, this was the
forerunner of today's geohazard maps.
The alluvial plains—huge swaths of land that lie on the riverbanks—became a
magnet for informal settlers over the last 20 years. And what started as a small
delta has grown over the years from continuous siltation.
That is the island now known as Isla de Oro, heavily populated for the last
20 years but nothing but a bar of silt and sand.
Bitter lesson
It is not true, as Cagayan de Oro Mayor Vicente Emano now says, that he could
not do anything because these lands had been settled since 50 years ago. That is
plain and simple evasion. Fifty years ago, these places were still uninhabited.
What the river did was to simply reclaim its old course. That should have
been predictable.
Cagayan de Oro is ignorant of typhoons. I myself do not know what it feels to
be in a typhoon. Perhaps that is the reason for the complacency.
Today's Cagayan de Oro would rather be agog over becoming a burgeoning
metropolis with over a million people on weekends. That will continue to grow
with the opening of Ayala Land's Centrio mall, hotel, and condo tower complex,
and the opening of Paseo del Rio mall, convention center and Riviera Hotel
high-rise of the genteel Cagayan de Oro heiress, Rafaelita Pelaez Pelaez.
The bitter lesson lies in the misplaced and mismatched mix of rapid urban
progress and inept local governance that has not kept up with the global
standards of neomodern urban living. Despite its touted growth, Cagayan de Oro
remains a "barriotic" city where the mayor tolerates a pedal-pushed and
two-stroke public transport system that is the bane of its traffic-choked roads.
It is a lesson in not having foresight of priorities. The mayor claims he is
propoor, and hence cannot remove the city's primitive public transport system
and the informal settlers who he sometimes allows to occupy one lane of concrete
roads.
That is a strange policy: a city government that encourages informal-settler
colonies to mushroom. The objective is clear: votes for the next elections.
Understanding the river
To know the Cagayan River is to understand its very name and the
characteristics of the terrain on which it meanders.
The name "Cagayan" was acquired even before the coming of the Spaniards in
1622. As early as the 1500s, the river was already known as Cagayan in official
documents.
One historian suggested geographical twinning: The river had exactly the same
features as the Cagayan River of Luzon.
Indeed, during the early Hispanic years, the place was known as "Cagayan el
chico" (little Cagayan), to distinguish it from El Rio Grande de Cagayan in
northern Luzon. And like its geographical counterpart, the river chisels its way
to the sea through scenic vertical limestone cliffs and forests.
When it enters the city, it becomes languid and quiet, but deep.
But upstream, the Cagayan River rambles down slope with an estimated 3,883
million cubic meters of runoff annually, making it one of the eight major river
basin systems of Mindanao. And while it encompasses 1,521 square kilometers of
mountainous terrain, it occupies only 86 sq km of level area.
That is why it is also the city's main tourism resource: Because it moves
down slope at a fast velocity, its water creates white-foam rapids so suitable
for white-water rafting—a natural trait not all rivers exhibit.
But there is one more thing to understand. The Cagayan River is an enormous
river that has no headwaters, unlike the Pulangi or the Rio Grande de Mindanao.
It actually serves as drainage for five other rivers, all large tributaries, up
in the Bukidnon mountains. All these rivers are themselves catch basins of
rainwater.
Environment Secretary Ramon Paje is right. And this old piece of public
information is certainly not Greek to many of us. It is incredible that the
city's local leaders have not pored over it. This is a serious sin of omission.
Clear warnings
On Dec. 15, I was already tuned in to public warnings aired by weathermen of
the incoming Tropical Storm "Sendong" (international name: Washi).
That evening, public storm signals were already issued. Misamis Oriental
would be under Signal No. 2. And as always, there were repeated bulletins of the
approximate time the storm would make landfall in the eastern Mindanao coast.
But Mayor Emano now says he did not know about the storm. How could that be?
True enough, as weathermen had announced, Dec. 16 started with downcast
skies. Slow and constant rains soon appeared, continuing for the rest of the
day. Sendong was scheduled to hit Cagayan de Oro very late at night.
I must admit that I was excited to experience my first big storm. By 10 to 11
that night, the wind began to howl. This went on until midnight and beyond. We
were now in the eye of the storm.
But my excitement was brief. The rainfall did not appear to be of the
cats-and-dogs variety; it came in steady trickles, dissipated, then resumed. It
was uneventful for the rest of the night.
The local power company turned off the electricity. Sleeping in the dark, one
could not help but listen to the continuous wind and the trend of the rainfall.
Nothing exciting or earthshaking.
But the Cagayan River, a drainage river with a known massive runoff, is not
to be judged that way.
Unknown to us, the rainfall over at the Bukidnon side was greater. That
rainfall had to naturally settle in its catch basin, and what a mammoth basin it
turned out to be.
That early dawn of Dec. 17, Macajalar Bay was on high tide. In all low-lying
areas and elsewhere in the city, people were asleep in the dark. The combination
was lethal. The rest is now history.
Where was Emano?
Sendong was already a household name, as announced by Pagasa, as
early as Dec. 15. Yet it is on record that the mayor never convened the City
Disaster Risk Reduction Council. Surely there was ample time for it. But again
he says he did not know of the warnings.
Where was Emano on the night Sendong hit Cagayan de Oro?
Nature itself was not without its dire warnings. In January 2009, the Cagayan
River overflowed in torrential currents and also claimed lives. That catastrophe
is too soon to forget.
And yet the city government allowed the informal settlers to mushroom. It had
enough time to design a functioning relocation program, but its last attempt at
what was touted as a propoor housing resettlement was so mired in controversy
(alleged misappropriated funds, with none of the promised land titles ever
issued) that it still leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
There is one life-and-death aspect that the city government has
procrastinated on: The Cagayan River is now heavily silted.
The Department of Environment and Natural Resources claims that its warnings
to the city government fell on deaf ears. No serious dredging has ever been
conducted despite a dredging machine that was acquired more than 10 years ago.
With dredging, the city government must now consider demolishing the entire
Isla de Oro.
Under a recent prestige project where it built a tiny boulevard that it
called the "Golden Mile," the city government closed the river channel between
the delta and the eastern bank. That was grossly wrong, for it narrowed further
what was left of the river's breadth.
Accountability
The city government under Emano, in power for the last 13 years, has much to
answer for.
It will have to account for the death of more than 1,000 people, the
disappearance of more than 1,000 others who may have been washed out to sea,
perhaps never to be found by their grieving families, and the displacement of
more than 10,000 families.
And it will have to answer for the dumping of the unclaimed bodies in the
city's garbage dump—an unconscionable act that is the height of insensitivity.
No one in Cagayan de Oro is without friends and family who perished. My
family was spared, but I will now live with the memory of so many friends who
did not survive the devastation.
I will remember the Yrastorza family—Joaquin, Maria Sagrario (Mercader), and
their daughter Tish, who died embracing one another. I will remember my cousin
Joann Dingcong, who never made it to the rooftop of her own house in Emily
Homes. But where could she have gone? All the rooftops in that subdivision were
underwater in seconds.
I will remember Nieves Pacana Arcadio, the daughter of a former Cagayan de
Oro mayor. She never made it because she could not fit in an overhead window
that her niece Jana had broken as their escape hatch after the floodwaters
reached for their ceiling.
I will remember little Mica Samson. Her mother's body has been found but Mica
remains missing. Her grandmother, who loved her so much and took her to school
each day, will forever be in grief.
And so will countless nameless others.
Rich and poor
The storm hit rich and poor alike. The daughter of a former Cabinet official
was saved by a floating surfboard. Her neighbor, a snooty woman doctor, had to
sit it out on her rooftop drenched in rain.
Precisely because both rich and poor were devastated, the more it becomes
mandatory for heads to roll. And the investigation must focus on the mayor.
There are those who say that a proud city has been brought to its knees. It
makes no difference to me.
This is home, albeit a home now in tatters. If I have loved her all my life,
I will love her until my last breath.
Chief News Editor: Sol Jose Vanzi
© Copyright, 2012 by PHILIPPINE HEADLINE NEWS ONLINE
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