Mother cherishes birth of ‘miracle’ baby girl after devastating waves crash into city

Emily Sagalis cried tears of joy after giving birth to a “miracle” girl in a typhoon-ravaged Philippine city, then named the baby after her mother, who went missing in the storm.

The girl was born on Monday in a destroyed airport compound that was turned into a makeshift medical center, with her bed a piece of dirty plywood resting amid dirt, broken glass, twisted metal, nails and other debris.

“She is so beautiful. I will name her Bea Joy in honor of my mother, Beatriz,” Sagalis, 21, whispered shortly after giving birth.

Sagalis said her mother was swept away when giant waves generated by Super Typhoon Haiyan surged into their home near Tacloban, the capital of Leyte province, which was one of the worst-hit areas, and she has not been seen since.

More than 10,000 people are believed to have died in Leyte, and many hundreds on other islands across the central Philippines, which would make Haiyan the country’s worst recorded natural disaster.

But in the most tragic of circumstances, Bea Joy restarted the cycle of life. “She is my miracle. I had thought I would die with her still inside me when high waves came and took us all away,” she said, as her tearyeyed husband, Jobert, clasped the baby and a volunteer held an IV drip above them.

The husband said the first wave that came carried their wooden home in the coastal town of San Jose many meters inland, washing all of the family outside. He said the entire community had been washed away, with the once picturesque area replaced by rubble and the bloated remains of people and animals.

“We are supposed to be celebrating today, but we are also mourning our dead,” Jobert said.

He said it was God’s will that he found his wife floating among the debris.

They were carried away for what felt like hours until the water subsided, and they found themselves sheltering in a school building where other mudsoaked and injured survivors had huddled.

The couple and their surviving neighbors subsisted there until Monday morning only on bottles of water they found among the debris. Jobert said he knew that his wife was about to give birth any day, but no help or aid had come.

“She began labor at 5 am so we had to walk several kilometers before a truck driver hitched us a ride,” he said.

The young military doctor who attended to her, Captain Victoriano Sambale, said the new mother’s water had already broken by the time the couple stepped inside the building, and then developed bleeding during the delivery.