Memories of the missing

 

Marawi, Philippines – Kids playing on wooden beams, men chatting, and dust rising from the rust-colored earth. Even at 2 in the afternoon, there is a cool stillness at the Boganga Lake View Shelter in Lanao del Sur. Lined with hundreds of 24-square meter shelters with green roofs, the site houses around 680 families displaced by the Marawi conflict. Many of them live lives of resilience amid loss.

Didato “Ato” Candidato Aramayan, 58, is one of these residents. Stoic and quiet, he works as a carpenter to provide for his four children, the youngest of whom is only two years old.

It’s been more than two years since his wife, Mosmira, disappeared in the siege but the memory of her disappearance is etched in his mind. The day she went missing, Mosmira went out to buy medicine for their children at the local “botika” or pharmacy. She was wearing a violet dress. Then, shots rang, buildings were set on fire, and extremists tore through the city. Marawi went ablaze.

Didato scoured the local palengke (fish market) when Mosmira didn’t come home that night. He came back empty-handed to four children, two of whom still ill. With two sick kids and two other young ones to take care of, he had no choice but to wait. Outside, their city was in a panic and people were evacuating. Soon they would have to leave too.

Figure 1 Didato Candidato longs for his wife, Mosmira. Mosmira went missing at the height of the Marawi siege; no sign of her has been found since.

Didato and his children waited four days for Mosmira to come home. On May 27, with the clash showing no signs of abating, they finally fled. Holding two sick kids in his arms, he walked to the evacuation in Saguiaran, more than an hour away from Marawi by foot. “I couldn’t [afford to] worry about my wife because I had to think of my sick children [first],” he said.

When they arrived at the evacuation center, Ato sought medical treatment for his children immediately. He spent more than a month tending to them before they recovered from diarrhea. Thinking Mosmira had fled to a different center, he asked around if people had seen her but found no leads. Once his children recovered, he left them with fellow bakwits (evacuees) to search for their mother. He reached as far as Davao, 250 kilometers away but she was nowhere to be found.

It took a year for Didato to accept that Mosmira may have died in the siege. An estimated 1,200 people were killed in the Marawi crisis. While most of the death toll were extremists killed in the war, civilians also perished, leaving behind unclaimed or unidentified bodies buried in unmarked graves. Closure can come slowly for families of the missing. “At first, I thought I would find my wife. It hadn’t crossed my mind that she was dead,” Ato says.

Now, Ato lives with his children and other families in Lake View temporary shelter in Boganga. More than two years after the war, he remains one of 126,000 internally displaced people from Marawi. As of April 2020, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates more than 25,000 families are still are unable to come home, spread between temporary shelters and host families. Ato struggles to take care of four kids while making a living. Life is hard but he says, to cope he thinks of his children. Only his eldest child, 8-year-old Muner,* understands what happened. The others, too young, still search for their mother at times.

Mosmira’s body was never found. Like many victims of the siege, her death has not even been officially recorded yet. Ato says he never had the chance to report her as missing or get her a death certificate; he hasn’t gotten any reparations for his wife’s death either. With four children to provide for, he has no time to spare processing papers.

Mosmira and Ato were together for 11 years. Mosmira was tall, plump, and fair, Ato recounts. They got along well and never fought. Some days he longs his wife and weeps thinking of her, but he knows he has to be strong for his family.

“My dream is to have my children finish school,” he says, speaking of his three sons and one daughter. The Marawi siege took many things from him– his wife, their home, and stability. But it’s left him with two important things: his children, and the resolve to give them the best future he can. For them he hopes for a better world.

 

*The child’s name has been changed to protect his identity