In 2021, 42 years after having lost three of her children to the current of the Yuna River and the winds of Hurricane David, Ana Josefa Díaz met a long-haired mulatto woman, resident in Italy, who claims to be her daughter and who two other 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! I never saw her or my other two children again.”
Ana Josefa Díaz was 33 years old, the Yuna River, second largest and most important in the country, dragged her about 60 kilometers, on Friday, August 31, 1979, and it would have swallowed three of his four children. One saved her 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 after 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 lady, He smiled and agreed to the count, with a new element: the question of whether or not his children Ramón Eugenio, Luisa Andrea and Rosanny Díaz Diloné are alive.
change history
Without fright, resigned, Doña Fefa shows doubts, although she says that the mulatto they met with in 2021 in a restaurant in Bonao, has features similar to those of Diloné. “She is Indian like her father, he looks like him and his family, they would also be the same age, about 50 years old”.
A woman, a resident of Maimón, another municipality of Monseñor Nouel, was the one who brought the information that her daughter was alive. She was referring to the one that she was 9 years old (Luisa Andrea), when the natural disaster, but that He was married and resides in Italy. “They call her Esther, we met in a restaurant and she said 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, radio or television (although she wants one to watch the news), and lack of financial 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.
Explaining that his telegram will be published in the newspaper Listín Diario, he dictated the following: “What I wanted was to make a call to Ramón Eugenio Díaz DilonéIf he is alive, I live in Los Quemados de Bonao. That if he is alive, that he appears where I am for me to watch over him”. And to Rosanny Díaz Diloné “that if she is alive, that she show up, I want to see her before I die.” Esther told her that she would do a DNA test to confirm her relationship.
Three children rescued her
When reviewing her adventures with the Listín Diario team, Mrs. 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 It would be his refuge when Hurricane David swept through the river.
“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.
He says that the current dragged them and she managed to grab onto a stick and then board a raft that took her about 60 kilometers to the municipality of Cotuí, Sánchez Ramírez province. The next day, the raft got stuck, and with eyes full of dirt, torn clothes, he saw two children, as if he were hallucinating.
They did not want to help her because they were afraid. “They didn’t believe I was human, that after 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 appears satisfied and unemotional, says that in her dreams she listens, sometimes the voice of a girl who calls her mom“that is the smallest and I have even seen it 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.