33 years and still waiting

THIRTY-FIVE-year-old Kris Buntag knows very little of the young man in the old, grainy black and white photo.

Buntag said she was a toddler when the young man, then 26, disappeared in 1983.

Without that single photo, Buntag said she would not be able to remember the young man’s face. She has no idea if his eyes twinkled when he laughed; she does not know if the crease of many smiles had lined the corners of his mouth.

The young man in the grainy photo is the husband of Buntag’s then 24-year old-mother; the father she knows very little and very much about.

Buntag said her father, Bernardo Buntag Sr., was a line man for an electric company in Misamis Oriental. One day 33 years ago, Buntag said her mother was suddenly informed by his father’s co-workers that Bernardo was taken by armed men.

"All we know is that he was fixing a wire in a highway somewhere in Misamis Oriental when he was taken,” she said.

“We think they took him because they thought that he was a member of the NPA (New People’s Army)," Buntag said.

She said her father was active in Churchrelated activities, a fact that may have led State or State-sanctioned forces to suspect he was an activist.

Buntag said family and friends have been searching for Bernardo since then.

Even now, she said, she and her sister have not given up hope that one day, her father would surface.

"It was hard for my mother to lose my father like that,” she said.

“When he was taken, my mother had to immediately find a job to support us. Thankfully she found one and was able to support us, her two children,” she said.

As the elder child, she said she witnessed and at times bore her mother’s grief even while struggling with her own.

"I distinctly remember the trips my mother made to so many places. When one of their friends would say, for example, 'Hey, I heard that your husband was seen at a terminal in Bukidnon,' she would really go there just for the small chance of seeing him again," Buntag said.

Even after a popular revolt ousted then President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, Buntag said her father remained like a ghost to her family and her mother never stopped looking for her missing husband until she passed away in 2009.