Cotabato City– Kongan Guialil-Kamid, a midwife, and her family survived three days in darkness, buried under tons of debris without food and water when the Tsunami Earthquake collapsed the building they were renting in, along with several landmark structures in this city on August 17, 1976.
Guialil-Kamid, then 26, was pregnant when she and her family were buried deep into an avalanche of concrete materials crashed in the aftermath of the Magnitude Intensity 7.8 Earthquake (in the Richter Scale). She suffered from a partial miscarriage and her third child did not live long after her delivery on January 15, 1977.
More than 4,000 people died, over 2,000 injured and 4,000 more were missing hereabout, 44 years ago in the earthquake that terribly shook Central Mindanao areas, within seconds from close-to-midnight of August 16 to past 12:00 early morning of August 17, 1976. The tremor had had several aftershocks weeks and even months thereafter.
Kongan and her husband Ibrahim Kamid Jr., then 25, were literally buried alive three days in bent bodies, lying-in face-down and were constricted by fallen large volumes of concrete, and corrugated steel bars—barely able to turn and shield their second child Zahra Joy, then six- to seven-month old, and their niece Saguira, 14, whose left arm had to be amputated, following their rescue.
Now, 44 and married with three children of her own, Zahra Joy Kamid- Guibonen is a humanitarian worker herself and employed at the Rapid Emergency Assistance on Disaster Incidents of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM-READi).
Passion for Humanitarian Works
Her family’s nightmare experience, she says, has made humanitarian works her passion in life that she had to go two years furthermore in college to take up a BS in Social Works, at the University of Mindanao, after finishing AB Psychology at the Notre Dame University.
To Zahra joy, working in the line of her profession is an opportunity of giving back, being grateful to the Almighty and to people instrumental to their rescue and survival—and live a normal life again. She had worked for the Ecumenical Commission for Displaced Families and Communities under Fr. Eliseo Mercado, Jr. OMI, up until the ECDFC has evolved into Mindanao Tulong Bakwit (MTB), under Rose Ibrahim-Ebus, which figured in much of the local and international intervention programs during the humanitarian crisis in 2008.
Kamid Jr., an educator by profession, was working as local government operations officer for the then Ministry of the Local Governments and Community Development (MLGCD), assigned in Parang, Maguindanao, while Kongan was a midwife working for the City Hospital under the late Dr. Eduardo dela Fuente.
A premonition of sorts of what was going to happen then, Kongan recall that her husband Ibrahim Jr. took all his books from their old tailoring shop to their new branch at the ground floor of the Sultan Hotel-Cum-Theater Building. The books in a handful of piles would turn out to be their shield from falling concrete slabs and posts that could have pinned them to death.
Most of the quake victims then were trapped and pinned to death under fallen building structures and many others drowned in tidal wave-triggered flash floods along the shorelines of the Moro Gulf. A coastal community in Barangay Linek was a ghost village after waves 30 feet high brought triggered instant deep floodwaters that literally took it off the face of the earth, according to a filmed documentary by the Associated Press (AP), two days after the incident.
Spared, the couple’s eldest child, a boy, slept that night with his grandparents at the main commercial shop, the old Stag Tailoring owned by the Guialils and the Kamids, along Magallanes St. in Cotabato City, now Don Rufino Alonzo Street.
The ill-fated Stag Tailoring Branch, where the young Kamid couple lived and were trapped that fatal day, was one of the top commercial sites dotting in colorful city-lights the road at night at the ground floor of the Sultan Hotel, along Don Rufino Alonzo St., next-door to Radiola Store and the hotel’s front-desk entrance.
The Kamid couple, and Saguira, now single-handed, have lived to tell the story—and so has Zahra Joy, now 44, retelling it from her elders’ narratives of personal experience, and thence onto her fellow humanitarian workers or trainees of Incident Command System (ICS) for disaster risk-reduction management in BARMM.
Unable to withstand the weight of a concrete solid preventing it from sinking deeper upon them, Saguira’s left arm had to be amputated.
‘Not by the Bread Alone’
They lived not by the bread but by God’s Words said in prayers—and in listening on a transistor radio set to dxMS daily reporting of field radio station staff and commentaries of anchors—among them, Carlos Bautista, Cecil Cadorna, Jess Cortes, Fred Babao, Mike Robregado, and Jun Subido.
The Kamids hosted young relatives either as transients, or as staying-in students. One of them Aseria Kamid, 10, then an elementary pupil died of an injury she sustained from a steel bar thrusted against her back springing from a solid concrete. Another household member, Matawali Ali, living with the Kamid family, was exhumed dead. Two others– Abdulla Mustapa, a visiting relative and a municipal sanitary inspector in Datu Piang, Maguindanao, and driver Kinteng Balong, both survived. They were awake till about midnight and were eating durian fruits when the ground started shaking, recalls Kongan Kamid, now 70– and suddenly, the whole building was shaken, too, like a small boat cradled by big waves midsea.
Arms-stretched overhead was the elder Kamid’s food offering and the fragrance of burnt incense set in daily prayers, which tended to deliver the energy– and the oxygen– the couple and the children needed for breathing, replacing the light energy that they had lost in darkness underground.
What did they eat or drink in three—long—days of their lives in darkness and constricted in small space, lying-in face-down and still managed to breath? The answer is that they had no food to eat, nor water to drink. Only Baby Zahra Joy had some bottles of instant milk pre-mixed by her mother the night before.
Zahra Joy’s parents would recall to her as she grew up that the fragrant smell of the Maguindanaon incense called “tudtugan” brought them underneath some kind of energy—and who knows, the Oxygen to breath with— as if filling-in for a lost light energy to survive the total darkness, and amid the earth’s scaling-up temperature.
Fallen Buildings
It can be recalled that among the buildings and structures that collapsed in the historic August 1976 Earthquake were the old South Seas Store Building along Jose Lim, near Anaiz Gasoline Station; Sultan Theater on Magallanes (Rufino Alonzo); Francel Theater on Jose Lim, and partly Reyu Theater on Pendatun Avenue; the Harvardian Colleges Main Building (Pendatun Avenue);
The Di Max Restaurant in what is now Fuji Image on Makakua Street; the Sagittarius Pharmacy Store in what is now Pritong Manok Restaurant, fronting Mang Inasal along Pendatun Avenue, the First Traders’ Store (then First Gift Trading) Building along Makakua St., and the Cotabato Auto Supply Store along Don Rufino Alonzo Street.
The Rescue
How were they rescued? The late Dr. Dela Fuente met the elder Kamid at the rescue site of the fallen Sultan Hotel-cum-Theatre Building. It happened that Kongan, a midwife, was Dela Fuente’s medic staff member at the City Hospital on Pendatun Avenue (then Almonte Street) the Notre Dame University Auditorium Building and the New Grand Hotel, fronting the old Cotabato City Wharf.
The physician then prodded the crane operator on-duty that day not to leave the place as yet for another site, and to continue on a calibrated digging of the debris of Sultan Hotel-Cum-Theater Building, because the family of his staff had been pinned under heavy volume of concrete debris there. The operator did acquiesce, and true enough, the presence of life soon manifested—and there was not one, but six persons dug alive underneath, including the newborn Zahra Joy, then six- to seven-month old.