Sawt Falasteen - Philippine typhoon victims remember day Pope Francis brought hope

It was desperately needed, mayor Alfred Romualdez told AFP on Tuesday, a day after the pontiff died in Rome.

Already in his late 70s, the pope had insisted on making the January 2015 trip to the central Philippines despite an approaching storm.

"He didn't have to do that. He didn't have to come here in bad weather. He could have waited for three or four more days," said Romualdez.

Just over a year earlier, Super Typhoon Haiyan had left more than 7,000 people dead or missing after it slammed into Leyte province and the surrounding areas.

The storm and the massive waves it generated flattened entire coastal communities that were already among the poorest in the Catholic-majority country, leaving mass graves, collapsed homes and dazed survivors in its wake.

"(People) were asking a lot of questions, and they were important questions. It affected their faith... they were shattered," said Romualdez.

"We lost 500 children, so people were starting to question... These children were innocent. Why did they have to die?"

- 'Was I a sinner?' -

"The pope gave us hope," Jenita Aguilar said of his 2015 visit. Her seven-year-old son Junko was among the hundreds of lost children.

The 53-year-old still remembers the moment Haiyan's surging winds and floodwaters ripped her son from his uncle's arms as the family clung to the unfinished rooftop of a store.

They would spend two days walking through Tacloban's villages searching piles of bodies -- human and livestock -- in hopes of finding him.

Sometimes she still imagines him alive, rescued and living safely in someone else's home, his memories of his parents wiped away by trauma.

"I was asking God why it had to happen. Was I a sinner?" she told AFP through tears. "I was asking if I wasn't a good mother."

With grief driving a wedge in her marriage, Aguilar said she went outside to catch a glimpse of the passing Popemobile on the day Pope Francis spoke in Tacloban.

To her surprise, the pontiff reached down and clasped her hand, delivering a blessing.

"It was a sign the Lord still loved me," she said, tightly clutching a rosary the pontiff personally handed her that day.

"God used (the pope) as a bridge for me and my husband to return to Him."

- A heart at ease -

Aguilar's neighbour Gina Henoso, 50, was among the sea of 200,000 that turned out in heavy rain that day to watch Pope Francis conduct his mass at the Tacloban airport.

Dressed in a thin yellow rain poncho, identical to the one worn by the pope onstage, she walked two hours from her home to reach the venue.

It was nothing compared with the hours she had spent wandering in search of food each day after Haiyan, she said.

"When I saw him, I was reminded that I was really alive," Henoso said, her voice cracking.

At the storm's peak, she and her seven children had been forced to squeeze into a neighbour's cramped toilet as they waited for authorities to evacuate them.

"I still have nightmares about what happened... I'm still anxious whenever it rains," Henoso told AFP on Tuesday.

She described walking "with dead bodies all around just to look for milk for my children".

But the pain lifted for her that rainy January day, she said.

"The rain was hard, but when you see him in his Popemobile, there's something about it that makes your heart at ease."

- 'With his flock' -

"How do you mourn ... (when) you don't have a roof over your head, you have a lot of dead, and you still have to prepare for your next meal?" Father Chris Militante asked Tuesday.

The priest, who serves as media director for the Archdiocese of Palo, told AFP he had every reason to fear his parishioners would begin to doubt their faith after Haiyan's devastation.

But when the pope arrived in Tacloban, he didn't pretend to have easy answers.

"Maybe you have a lot of questions. Maybe I don't know the answers. But I am here," he remembers Pope Francis saying during the mass.

And it was his presence that mattered, said Militante.

"In spite of the devastation... God was with us through the (pope's) presence," he said of that day. "We didn't worry."

A decade on, the priest said he hopes people will remember Pope Francis as he chooses to -- as a shepherd "being with his flock".

"(Pope Francis said) that you have to smell like the sheep, and he did. He walked the talk."

With all eyes now turning to Rome, where a conclave will determine Pope Francis's successor, Aguilar, the grieving mother, insists she knows exactly what kind of man is right for the job.

"Someone who will treat Filipinos the way Pope Francis treated us," she said.

"Someone who would go back to Tacloban again."

Y.AlMasri--SF-PST