"It doesn't matter if we lose everything, as long as we can have our parents here," said Shylyny, a high school student who dreams of becoming an accountant or a journalist. She accepts that her parents are dead; she only wishes to find their bodies, and the body of a brother who did not survive.
Shylyny said she climbed to the ceiling of the family's two-story home when the water suddenly rose. She and her brothers clutched wires and anything they could hold on to.
"The last time I looked, my mother was just beside me, but when I looked again she was gone," she sobbed.
Her 12-year-old brother, Richard Chris Negru, held on to their mother's hand, but she could not move because her legs were pinned under debris.
He said she told him to hold on to his younger brothers, to take care of his siblings and to be a good boy. Then she let go, and was swallowed by the rising water.
The children's father was able to carry the two younger boys to the ceiling, but he, too, disappeared in the water soon after. Richard Chris took the two boys and they managed to reach a neighbor's rooftop.
Shylyny tried to save her 10-year-old brother, Richard Lawrence Dacuno, who was mentally disabled. She held him but struggled as the water rose, and when she was hit by debris she lost her grip.
"I thought I would not survive because I really did not know how to swim and I was already feeling weak," she said.
She grabbed a neighbor by his shirt, and he helped her reach higher ground. She found her other brothers in the neighbor's rooftop.
Richard Lawrence's body was found in the stairs of a neighbor's house later that day. Rescuers placed his body by the roadside with other corpses. The siblings' grandfather Ricardo Negru Jr. left him there overnight to look for Shylyny's cousin. When he returned, the body had been collected. More than two weeks later, the family is still searching.
The grandfather said the boy was likely buried in one of the city's mass graves, but he did know where.
Negru, a frail 70-year-old, now lives in a church that has been turned into a shelter and spends his days trying to find Richard Lawrence's body, along with those of his son-in-law and his daughter, his only child.
With tears welling in his eyes, he said he only wants to give them a decent burial beside his wife's grave.
Negru's sister Rosie Aguila has taken in his orphaned grandchildren. A retired teacher with two grown children, she said she was close to their mother and will raise them as her own.
The children carry grim memories. Richard Chris, the 12-year-old, vividly recalls seeing the body of his younger brother in the neighbor's staircase. "He had blood in his eyes," he said.
When asked how he's doing, he simply mumbles, "I'm OK."
