MONTREAL – Frank Daria says the last he heard from his sister-in-law, Christita Allana, she was waiting for Typhoon Haiyan shortly before the storm was about to hit the Philippines. Now he’s desperate for word on what’s happened to the woman after the storm in the midst of massive phone outages.
“There’s no communication since after the typhoon until now. And it’s only until now that we receive at least an image,” he said. “We don’t know yet what happened to them.”
Daria’s church, St. Thomas the Apostle on Boul. St-Laurent, is trying to make contact with his sister-in-law, her husband, Amancio Allana, and couple Val and Virginia Garcia. All four of them are Canadian citizens who were there on church business, Daria said.
Another Montrealer looking for more word on his loved ones is Houssam Hammoudi, who was supposed to marry his fiancée, Grace Acojedo, in May. She lives in Ormoc City, a hard-hit region of the archipelago nation. He says he learned through a raspy phone line that Acojedo’s intestine had been perforated.
“The ceiling fell off on her. That’s where she got her upper body wounds. And lots of shattered glass in her face,” he said.
The accident threw Acojedo’s mother in a coma, Hammoudi said. He plans on flying to Ormoc City Wednesday. But like a lot of people with family in the region, he is frustrated by the dearth of information coming out of the storm-wracked country.
Montreal is home to thousands of people of Filipino origin, with 11,000 inhabiting the borough of Côte-des-neiges-NDG.
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