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| Decades after, my wacky family! |
From a small, rural town to the big city
My earliest childhood recollection was being with my mom who worked very hard, helping my farmer father provide the best future for me and my siblings.
I come from a big family, with five older brothers and four older sisters. My parents believe that education is the optimum ticket to better our lives. With all 10 of us attending school, my parents worked hard together to make ends meet. Both my father and mother had little formal schooling, but they were active in our community, with my father being a baranggay capitan for about 19 years.
I remember that aside from tilling the lands, my father drove a public utility jeepney for a living; while my mother organized housewives and gave them jobs as needlewomen. She would get contracting jobs from various businessmen, some of whom were foreigners, and she would sometimes bring me along to her meetings with them. There was one very vivid childhood memory I have of those trips when I got offered my favorite native delicacy of kutsinta. No matter how much I wanted to taste it, I was overcame with shyness. I regretted that and I told I myself that I should not be timid especially when I know what I liked.
At school, I enjoyed studying. It became my parents’ pride that I would be chosen as our school’s representative in declamation contests and win. I remembered my mother drafted her own poems for me to recite during family reunions and community programs.
When I turned nine, my parents decided to enroll us in Manila. My older brothers and sisters who were in college level were already studying in various universities in Recto and were staying in different apartments and dormitories. My parents were offered a tiny bit of land to build a small house in Sampaloc, and my parents decided that it would be best for all of us to live and study in Manila. They bought the land and built the tiniest house I have ever seen. A 26-square meter abode was to become my new home, far from the verdant rice fields and vast tree-lined playing grounds that I loved.
It was in Manila that I learned how to cross the busy, traffic-jammed streets, haggle in crowded public markets, and order fast food in Jollibee. My quiet, slow and steady life at the province was replaced with the congested city’s noise and quarrelsome, drug-dealing neighbors. So I turned to books, reading and learning. I enjoyed school more and was recognized for my efforts. When it was time for my elementary graduation practice, I had to rehearse with my teachers the speech that I was to deliver in front of our graduating class but I didn’t make it because I was feeling weak. During the actual graduation day, at the break of dawn, instead of wearing the white graduation dress, I was changing into a hospital gown. I was admitted for appendicitis and was operated on while my classmates were receiving their elementary diplomas.
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| Like a seedling removed from the plant nursery to grow in the open sun |
