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A Golden Story of Mine.

I just want to share with you my own story of life.

I come from a very simple family in the province of Romblon, Philippines. I am the youngest and have 4 siblings, 1 bother and 3 sisters. My father is a farmer and my mother is a plain housewife.

My father is born aklanon (from the province of Aklan). He left the province when his parents died. He was a teenager that time. The land property of their parents was left under his elder brother with thrust. I’m not sure the exact land size of that property but, at least 1/5 of that land size is now the Caticlan Airport, the airport near Boracay Beach. When my father decided to get his part of the property, I was 7 years old then, my uncle (trustee of the property) refused him, as he is not a legitimate son according to my greedy uncle. My father can’t do anything about it as we haven’t enough budget to sue his elder brother about the rights for the property. Also, my greedy uncle has already distributed the land to his children. I just heard my father saying, “I leave all of this to God, he knows everything about it.”.

My mother is a native Romblomanon. She met my father in Romblon as a caretaker of a politician in our Barangay. They fell in love with each other and soon they get married. They acquired a 100 sqm size of land to build a nipa house with no electricity, no deep well. In short, they lived the typical way of living in the isolated provinces.

Until the time that my older siblings got to school, the unstable income of my father was not enough to sustain our food and education. Sometimes, we ate stewed sabah (one kind of bananas) as our lunch with grated coconut or stewed corn with grated coconut. I remember one time, I tried to hide under the desk my food for lunch, a mashed sabah banana (“nilupak” in our dialect) wrapped with banana leaf (instead of lunch box), to my classmates not because I was shy but because I didn’t want to be annoyed. That food enough until I got home from school. I walked 7 kilometers without slippers in the morning and in the evening, before and after classes in high school. This lasts for 4 years, because our house is far from the town proper where the school is located. I sung and I cried during the times when I was very scared to walk along the dark and rough road with huge of trees and no house near it. Aside from bird’s sounds, I heard the strange noise coming from the leaves of the trees. During weekends, we need to harvest rice from other farm to get paid for only 12 pesos (Philippine Money) a day, to buy at least 2 kilos of rice that good for 1 week for us to survive. We need to sacrifice that way in order for us to get the high school diploma without thinking of what will happens next.

After high school my other older siblings need to stop to give way at least one of us will continue in college. We need to work harder than before. Most of our neighbors encouraged and criticized us. They said, “You can’t afford to pursue the studies in college, you don’t have even food to eat, stop dreaming about it.” But, we treated that as a challenge and proved them that we could. And, we proved it after the tremendous years of hard work and suffering and during those days that we didn’t eat just to support the needs of my sister for college.

At least now we have the pride and we proved that “being poor is not a hindrance to reach your dreams.”