Jessica Soho shares with Bea Alonzo her near-death experiences as journalist

With her decades-long career as a journalist, Jessica Soho is no longer a stranger to danger. 

The veteran reporter was the guest on Bea Alonzo’s latest vlog Saturday, where they talked about their respective careers while preparing mango jam.

Jessica shared with the Kapuso actress her near-death experiences when she went to Afghanistan and flew to Spratlys.

She said a year after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, she flew to Afghanistan and was with a group of deminers, or people who removed or detonated land mines.

“A wounded deminer was picked up, but when the ambulance left—this was being filmed by our cameraman just 10 feet away from the ambulance—the ambulance must have gone over a landmine and it exploded,” Jessica said in Filipino.

“The waves are real. You can really feel the waves. It felt surreal. Apparently, the world going on mute is true,” she added.

Another experience Jessica shared was when she went to Spratlys in the 1990s but she and her crew couldn’t find the island of the Philippines. They decided to go back but the airplane started to stray away.

“The plane’s path strayed away and we were almost out of gas. We didn’t know where we were at some point,” she said. 

“When the pilot saw an island, it was like a miracle because it could have been any island, but all of a sudden the island he saw had a landing strip,” she added. “What are the chances, out of the blue, there’s suddenly an island with a landing strip?”

Back in the newsroom in Manila, meanwhile, Jessica said they thought she and the crew had already died.

“They thought we were dead. They called my father in La Union. They were preparing our obituaries. But here we are, alive,” she said.

Bea asked if anything changed in her after those experiences, and Jessica said it made her realize that life was short.

“Life is really short. Life is fleeting,” said the journalist. – RC, GMA News