Trapped in the Homes They Thought Would Protect Them

Jane Lita Baquilta and her family lived in a house they thought would keep them safe from the natural disasters that frequently batter the Philippines. Instead, it became her grave.

Her husband, Jeffrey Crisostomo, 39, remembers the hope they felt when he and Ms. Baquilta, 38, moved in with their son and two daughters after being displaced by a typhoon in 2013. The house was part of SM Cares Village, a relocation site built for survivors of Super Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest ever recorded. It had destroyed their home in Sitio Tabla, a village on the island of Cebu, about 360 miles south of the capital, Manila.

“She was excited to move to that house because it was made of concrete, unlike our shanties here in the fields,” Mr. Crisostomo said.

The Philippines, located on the Pacific Ring of Fire, where much of the world’s seismic activity occurs, and the typhoon belt, is hit yearly by storms, earthquakes and floods. Its government sets aside billions of pesos each year for disaster-risk reduction, but many Filipinos complain that corruption drains those funds. Thousands of people had gathered in Manila less than two weeks before the earthquake to protest the misappropriation of billions of dollars meant for flood relief.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. visited Cebu two days after the quake, promising reconstruction aid. But in places like Sitio Tabla, such promises have become routine, repeated after every tragedy.

The night before the disaster, the Crisostomo family had gone to sleep early. They had to wake before dawn, Mr. Crisostomo said, to watch his son, John Jeffrey, 12, play sepak takraw, a sport sometimes described as volleyball with feet, the next morning.

The family was still asleep when the ground began to shake, Mr. Crisostomo said. Everything inside the house was falling — the walls, the ceiling, the window glass. Something had already fallen on his wife. He rushed to grab the children, but debris struck his thigh and he fell. He lost hold of them and could only throw John Jeffrey toward the door. Then something else crashed down, pinning Mr. Crisostomo to the floor.

The last thing he remembers before losing consciousness was his wife’s voice: “Don’t worry about what happens to us. Just make sure the children are safe.”

Outside, John Jeffrey ran as far as he could from the collapsing house, he later recalled. A shard of glass from the window cut his face on the way out, and he said he remembers only the chaos: neighbors shouting, running in different directions as homes caved in, everyone rushing toward open space. For hours, he waited for someone from his family to follow.

His father was in the hospital, his left arm broken and his left thumb cut off. A construction worker, Mr. Crisostomo now fears that he may never be able to return to work.

Jane Lita was fighting for her life when she was taken to the hospital. Her mother, Rosalina Sonet Baquilta, 71, said that when rescuers found Jane Lita, she was still conscious, asking about her children. When told that two of them had died, she fell silent. Rosalina believes heartbreak killed her.

The next time John Jeffrey saw his mother and sisters, they were lying in their coffins, their faces bloated almost beyond recognition. They were brought back to Sitio Tabla, to the same muddy field where their old shanty had once stood, the one Haiyan had destroyed.

“All I could do was cry,” John Jeffrey said.

Along a 27-mile stretch of highway on Cebu Island, from Borbon to Daanbantayan, families now live beneath blue and orange tarpaulins and thin blankets. Some refuse to return home for fear of aftershocks; others because there is nothing left. They clutch cardboard signs that request food and water or simply say “Help.”

Marisol Mahinay, 36, sleeps on the muddy soil with her husband, their children and nieces and nephews. By day, they cook donated rice and canned food over fires fed with wood from their ruined house. At night, they lie on damp cardboard, staring at the moonlight through the holes where their roof once was.

In the nearby town of Medellin, on Gibitngil Island, the Pilones family lived in a house directly under a cliff. When the ground shook, a massive boulder broke loose and crashed down, flattening their house instantly, killing Katherine, 27, her husband Marwin, 26, and their son, Jacob, 6. A rescuer found their 5-month-old daughter, Briana Grace, sheltered by the body of Katherine, who had been breastfeeding her.

Their home was made of plywood with a few concrete foundations, fragile against the rock that crushed it. Marwin’s father, Wilson Pilones, 46, lives in a house above theirs on the cliff. He said the pain was very difficult to describe, adding he could not accept the loss of his eldest son, a lifeguard who was celebrated for saving fishermen.

Wilson Pilones said he carried the bodies of his son, grandson and daughter-in-law out of the rubble himself. Beneath the debris, rescuers found a drawing by Jacob: a portrait of himself and his parents, and behind them an angel.

The family believes the angel in the drawing is Jacob’s baby sister, the only survivor.

In some parts of the province, even the evacuation centers failed. In San Remigio town, the entrance of a basketball-court-turned-shelter collapsed during a friendly game between disaster-response officers, killing five on the spot.

Jeffrey Crisostomo, who used to install culverts to keep floodwaters from rising, now has revisited the muddy field in Sitio Tabla where Haiyan once destroyed their home. His family’s coffins are buried there.

He no longer knows what work awaits him or where he will live. The SM Cares Village, once a symbol of hope, will soon be flattened, he said, and its residents relocated, displaced for the second time.