At 43 years of having lost three of her children due to the current of the Yuna River and the winds of Hurricane David, Ana Josefa Díaz meets a long-haired mulatto woman, living in Italy, who claims to be her daughter and that the other two little brothers are also alive.
“We were in the middle of the water when a volcano, higher than this house, took us. We didn’t see anything else, that’s where he took us. I stood on the ground once, I passed my hand over my face, and one of my daughters who was glued to me, said oh mommy!, and I never saw her or my other two children once more ”.
Ana Josefa Díaz was 33 years old, the Yuna River, second largest and most important in the country, dragged her regarding 60 kilometers, on Friday, August 31, 1979, and would have swallowed three of her four children. One saved his life in some bushes on the banks of the tributary and her husband climbed a mango tree. She just turned 62 married to Don Ramón Diloné, father of her eight children, three disappeared (ages 11, 9 and 6), one who died as a child and three others born following the hurricane.
With hearing problems, osteoporosis and poor circulation in her legs, Doña Fefa, as everyone calls her in Los Quemados, a community in the province of Monseñor Nouel, in her zinc-roofed house on the banks of the Yuna, opened her doors to a journalist who arrived unannounced to learn his story.
He took off the gloves with which he washed Diloné’s clothes, who was in a cocoa plantation, in the same town where they lost everything 43 years ago. The short, energetic and very affable old woman smiled and agreed to the count, with a new element: the question of whether or not her children Ramón Eugenio, Luisa Andrea and Rosanny Díaz Diloné are alive.
change history
Without fright, resigned, Mrs. Fefa shows doubts, although she says that the mulatto woman with whom they met in 2021 in a restaurant in Bonao, has features similar to those of Diloné. “She is Indian like her father, she looks like him and his family, they would also be the same age, regarding 50 years old.”
A woman, a resident of Maimón, another municipality of Monseñor Nouel, was the one who brought him the information that his daughter was alive. She was referring to the one who was 9 years old (Luisa Andrea), when the natural disaster struck, but who had married and lives in Italy. “They call her Esther, we met in a restaurant and she said that she was my daughter, that my eldest son is a doctor in the United States and that the youngest is in the Capital (Santo Domingo)”. She adds that Esther told her that she had not said anything out of fear, that the one who pulled her out of the river because of her hair was a soldier. Of that she gave few details.
Telegram and DNA test
Doña Fefa is out of date with technology, she does not have a telephone or a radio or television (although she wants one to see the news), and she lacks the economic resources to follow up and confirm the version.
He still believes in telegrams, that information that was broadcast on the radio and that is why “I have always wanted to put a telegram on Radio Santa María”, a Catholic station founded in 1956 in the province of La Vega and which maintains reach throughout the region. of the Cibao.
When explaining to him that his telegram will be published in the Listín Diario newspaper, he dictated the following: “What I wanted was to make a call to Ramón Eugenio Díaz Diloné, if he is alive, that I live in Los Quemados de Bonao. That if he is alive that he shows up where I watch over me”. And to Rosanny Díaz Diloné “that if she is alive, that she show up because I want to see her before I die.” Ella Esther told him that she would do a DNA test to confirm her relationship.
Three children rescued her
When reviewing her adventures with the Listín Diario team, Doña Fefa walked from her house, crossed a pedestrian bridge that is over the Yuna River in Los Quemados and showed the place where a huge wooden house was, which would be her refuge when the hurricane David, but that the river swept away.
“We left our house for this place, supposedly because it was safer. There were two disabled people who were carried away by the river, just like us when “the volcano” (the hurricane) came.
She says that the current dragged them and she managed to grab onto a stick and then get on a raft that took her regarding 60 kilometers to the municipality of Cotuí, Sánchez Ramírez province. The next day, the raft got stuck, and with her eyes full of dirt, her clothes torn, she saw two children, as if she were hallucinating.
They did not want to help her because they were afraid. “They did not believe that I was human, that following that disaster there was a person alive in the middle of that river.”
They agreed to help her, tied sticks with vines and took her out with the help of a third party, who put her clothes and shoes on her and carried her until they took her to a house, where she asked to be bathed and dressed and then took her to a polyclinic, where lasted seven days.
They prevented the river from dragging me to the Hatillo dam, they were angels for me”.
Doña Josefa, although she is satisfied and not very emotional, says that in her dreams she sometimes hears the voice of a girl who calls her mom, “that’s the smallest and I’ve even seen her in front of my bed.”
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The river
He doesn’t hold a grudge. At her age, Ana Josefa Díaz still bathes in the Yuna River, in the less abundant part and with the accompaniment of a neighbor. She assures that she is not afraid of her current and says that the dreaded tributary “is afraid of me”.
Your faith
She said that when she was on the raft in the middle of the river, sore from the blows received by the winds and tree branches, “a blue light accompanied me and they are still placed next to my pillow. “That is God, that is not from men or from the Government, that only God does.” Her rescuers always visit her, Julián Porfirio García, Almonte Mañón, and Daniel, except for the latter, who is sick in the United States.
