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Jimmy Relativo’s voice was full of pain, as he sat
on the shoreline just meters away from the sunken Philippine ferry
that is now his pregnant fiancée’s tomb.
He has returned to the rocky
coast of San Fernando on central Sibuyan Island hoping for word
about the fate of his 22-year-old fiancée, Rosielyn Ligay, who was
carrying his unborn child when MV Princess of the Stars went down at
the height of Typhoon Frank on June 21.
He acknowledged that Rosielyn is
now lying somewhere in the ocean, or more likely in the sunken ship,
but said he is prepared to wait for her remains to be recovered.
“I don’t know if I can move
on. It’s very painful but the search should go on. There are still
many people inside the boat, not only my wife,” Relativo said.
The couple had boarded Princess
of the Stars in Manila for the central island of Cebu on June 20 to
tell Ligay’s father of their plans to get married and start a
family.
They had taken the weekend off
from their jobs in Manila, where Rosielyn works as a mall saleswoman
and Relativo, 26, is a bakeshop employee. It appeared they had their
whole lives ahead of them.
But then the typhoon changed
direction and blew right into the path of Princess of the Stars.
“It was around nine in the
morning [of June 21] when the ferry started to be battered by huge
waves,” Relativo said between sobs. “We were holding each other
tightly and Rosielyn told me to prepare. By noon, the ferry had
listed to its side. The next thing we knew, we were sinking.”
Painstakingly, he recalled the
last moment he saw the mother of his child.
“I thought we both jumped off
the ferry but when I looked back she was still holding the rails on
the side . . . terrified. I shouted at her, but she was hit by a
wave. When I surfaced, she was gone,” Relativo said, holding back
the tears.
He added that he did not want to
abandon his fiancée but realized he needed to save himself. He said
some people had managed to get on board a life raft, and they
dragged him on it.
But his ordeal was far from over.
Clinging to life
“There were 30 of us in the
raft being tossed about by the sea,” he said.
Some of those lucky enough to
have made it onto lifeboats did not make it, succumbing to the
massive waves.
But Relativo was one of the few
lucky ones—of the nearly 850 passengers and crew on board the
ferry, only 57 survivors have been found six days on. It is believed
that most of the dead are trapped in the interior of the sunken
ship.
Twenty-four hours after Princess
of the Stars went down the raft, Relativo was one of those washed up
on the coast of Malunay town of Quezon province, about 90 kilometers
from the scene of the disaster.
Grieving father
Near Relativo, Alexander de la
Cruz showed a picture of his 8-year-old daughter, Angeline, smiling
as she sat beside her uncle, aunt and baby cousin Zayan.
De la Cruz had sent Angeline, the
fourth in a brood of six, to live with relatives in the United
States so she could have a better life. The family had returned for
a vacation and to visit family in the central islands.
“Her last words to me were,
‘I love you, Papa,’” he recalled as he was consoled by
relatives gathered around him.
With the search for bodies
temporarily suspended after it was revealed the ferry was carrying a
consignment of a deadly pesticide, de la Cruz said he will wait.
“I want to stay here until her
body is found,” he added, as beyond him the bow of the upturned
23,000-ton vessel juts out from the now-tranquil sea.
--AFP
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