Albay: A desolate landscape

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One child was happy that her doll “survived” the deluge of black sand and rocks from Mayon. (Click on image to view the slideshow)

I arrived in Albay yesterday, Dec. 7. On the plane, the view down below is depressing: vast swaths of land have been blackened by volcanic debris. And anywhere you look, you only see a brown and desolate landscape: trees have been stripped of their leaves, while the hills are barren.

In a story I filed to my paper, datelined Daraga, I noted:

One hundred two houses in Erna Callo’s village called Culiat are now deep in the dark sand. Although only two people died in Culiat – one of them, an 85-year-old man who was swept away by the two-meter high flood that afternoon – the tragedy here is no less felt.

In a more literal sense, many of the residents in this village, one of the hardest-hit by the calamity, painfully go through what Callo described as akin to a ritual: picking through their damaged belongings, salvaging what can be used again. It is a ritual that is at once heart-breaking for many of them.

One woman, Winifreda Dongon, cleaned up her granddaughter’s doll and put it on the roof of her submerged house, to dry, along with her family’s wet clothings, under the weak Thursday sun. “She was happy when she learned that her doll survived,” Dongon, 55, said, referring to a five-year-old granddaughter. She was grinning when she said this but the sadness in her eyes was unmistakable.

Villagers here busy themselves shoveling out sand from inside their living rooms; salvaging whatever wood they could from their destroyed houses in order to build makeshift huts by the roadside; sifting through sodden books, photographs, clothes and curtains. In front of several buried houses were computer monitors, beds, cabinets, drawers, vinyl records, and trophies won in a basketball game.

They are already resigned to the idea that they would spend their Christmas without electricity. On this particular afternoon, schoolchildren should be out in the streets on their way home or playing. But there were no children here; the few present were helping their parents gather wood, pitching tents, and shoveling the black sand out of their living rooms.