By Aurelio A. Pena
DAVAO CITY, (PNA) – Jovellar Street in the city of Zamboanga where I was born, lies next to Sta. Catalina district which links up with Talon-Talon and Rio Hondo coastal village just behind the historic Fort Pilar.
These places were bloody “war zones” last week and still echo with the pak-pak-pak-pak! of armalites and the ka-pom! of M-203 grenade rifles and boom! of mortars coming from the breakaway forces of Nur Misuari’s Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and government soldiers.
While writing this, it was the seventh day and the remaining Moro NMNLF forces were being surrounded and pushed to the sea, their areas of control getting smaller and running out of food and bullets.
The images I saw on GMA News channel daily, hour-by-hour, were distressing and sometimes shocking, as mediamen and Red Cross volunteers scamper for safety after a mortar round exploded nearby, wounding two RC volunteers. I saw two hostages running towards the soldiers, escaping from the MNLF snipers and forced to lie on the hot concrete road after suspecting them of being rebels, but eventually led away after seeing one of them bleeding from a shrapnel wound on the back.
The place where it happened no longer looks familiar to me, but the mention of the Lustre street reminded me of the time when I would walk all the way to Zamboanga Central Elementary School as a Grade One pupil. There were no jeepneys during that time, except calesas led by smelly horses that shit all over the city. This school is near Baliwasan where some 110,000 evacuees are housed in the new gymnasium and athletic grounds today, away from the stray bullets that fly daily from snipers at Sta Catalina and Rio Hondo village.
At the height of the fierce fighting at Sta Catalina, you could see the huge column of black swirling smoke at the background of TV newsman reporting the news at Tetuan district, across the ricefield that ends at the stretch of Jovellar Street near the government hospital. If I were still living in my birthplace here, I would be counted as one of the thousands of evacuees running for our lives to the safer grounds at Baliwasan.
Back in the 80’s when I was still shooting news pictures for the French news photo agency Sipa Press, I’m very sure I would get a frantic call from my French editor Jocelyn Manfredi to rush to Zamboanga City to cover the news for various magazines in Europe, Great Britain and US.
And since all flights are cancelled to and from Zamboanga, I have to find a way to get there by hook or by crook and that would probably be by midnight bus to Cagayan de Oro and get a bus there that brings us to Pagadian or Dipolog and from there, a van or another bus to the war zone in Zamboanga, which could take about eight to ten hours of travel.
(Thank goodness, I’ve retired from all this kind of adventure as a photojournalist–disposing all my Nikons away and sticking to my laptop to get out news stories and features to business and industry publications.)
For a long time, I’ve played with the idea of visiting my birthplace in Zamboanga to see how Jovellar Street looks like today. I wanted to see what buildings occupy the exact spot where our big nipa house stood, overlooking the rice fields of Tetuan. I even thought of tracing my childhood, planning a leisure walk along the streets of Sta. Catalina, Talon-talon, Sta. Barbara and Rio Hondo and visit the museum inside Fort Pilar.
But alas, all these places are now part of the “war zone” in the city of Zamboanga, the place of my birth.