By: Telly Gonzaga-Ocampo
Bridge Over Troubled Waters, a feature on Memory, Loss, and the Rivers that Refuse to be Forgotten
In November 1974, my husband carried a suitcase and a big title into Tacloban as Branch Manager, of Granexport. It was the early years of martial law. The country was holding its breath, and Leyte was learning how to build.
That was the year they finished San Juanico. They called it the Bridge of Love. It opened on July 2, 1974, with fanfare and cameras, built to honor the then First Lady, Imelda Romualdez Marcos. It arched gracefully over the water, stitching Leyte to Samar, passing through little islets like beads on a rosary. It was beautiful. The kind of beauty that makes you believe progress has a shape.
That same year, the Miss Universe pageant came to the Philippines. Miss Spain took the crown and Miss Aruba was first runner-up. On television, the world looked glamorous. On the ground, men were pouring concrete over rivers.
After San Juanico, came more bridges. Roads cut from Northern Leyte down to the south, all the way to Maasin. Tacloban had so many rivers. Ormoc had a wide lake cradled high on Mt. Amindong, and beneath it, engineers drilled for geothermal power. But the hinterlands were bleeding. Logging had almost denuded the mountains. The forests that once held the rain were gone.
And then the water remembered where it used to go.
The flashflood in Ormoc came like a verdict. Thousands died. It was during that same period, when people would later say, that “bridges were finished and river no more.” The natural pathways of the water were redrawn by machines, by plans, by haste. The rivers were told to move. So they did. For a while.
Today in Leyte, the rivers have gone berserk. They cut through subdivisions as if the houses were never there. They make a river in the middle of a street, in the middle of a living room. Children wade to school and mothers lift what they can to the roof. Fathers stand in brown water and watch years of work float away.
And while the water rises, another current moves underneath it. This is the kind of current that presents the “flow of money” running to the “maletas” of the powers that be. An old neighbor told me last week, shaking her head: “Flooding rampant, and money no more.”
She wasn’t talking about rain. She was talking about flood control projects. Budgets. Contracts. The kind of paperwork that drowns people slower than water but just as surely.
People are waiting now. Waiting for names to be called. Waiting for prosecution. Waiting for someone to say: “This is the one who did it. “
And the cruelest twist? The very person who was supposed to be in the thick of things in flood control is now being offered the microphone as a state witness.
What is happening feels like a telenovela with too many plots. Each week, a new revelation appears and each month, a new villain, or a new hero, depending on who’s telling the story, emerges from the most unexpected planet.
But this isn’t fiction. The water is real and the grief is real. The houses with a river running through them are real.
Do we now have what one man in the market called “selective justice?” Do we have a kind of punishment that picks out and chooses who to be punished? Do we have that kind of accountability that stops at certain gates?
So now the opposite is true: “Rivers pa more” and “Money flows to the maletas. “
San Juanico Bridge