Emmanuel Valdenor

Topic: Story on courage during Typhoon Yolanda (International Name Typhoon Haiyan) [Year 2014] by Emmanuel Valdenor I met him at the Mactan airport last Sunday. He and his sister along with six young ones left Tacloban and arrived in a boat from Baybay Leyte. They went straight to Mactan to take a plane for Manila where they were told by the airline they could not leave until the following Tuesday. So my wife and I decided to take them in until their appointed departure. The family, like other typhoon survivors, was fleeing the devastation in Tacloban. Relatives in Manila were already waiting to give them refuge and temporary shelter. Tall and lanky, Inteng would not strike you as an interesting person until he told us his story. At seven in the morning, the typhoon's fury was at its peak. He and his sister's family were huddled in a room in the ground floor of their two storey house. Now feeling nervous, he had to check every now and then whether all the doors and windows were still in their proper places.. Until he had seen, while peeking through the window, a mountainous pitch black wave rushing towards their house and roaring like a hungry lion... At the peak of his voice, he shouted and summoned everyone to run to the stairs, where knee deep water and the force of the on rushing current had caught up with them. Almost simultaneously, he had heard voices crying for help coming from the outside. It was their neighbor's family. They were clinging desperately to a steel window frame in their house just meters away across from where he was, fighting the rising flood threatening to engulf everyone into a river of salty water, mud and floating debris. Violently shaking from cold and the wind whipping his now frail body, he told himself he could not let these people die. Instinctively, he tore a TV (antenna) cable and made a rope out of it. He threw it and told them to tie it to their bodies. Summoning every strength left, he pulled it with all his might like Samson, and haled everyone to safety. He could not believe it himself, he said. All of them have squeezed through the steel frame window with only a one foot wide opening in it. It was a miracle, he said. Indeed it was. This guy, like countless others who brought out the best in the Filipino spirit to help others in their greatest time of need, is a genuine hero...