Despite
the Obstacles My Family’s Philippines Perseveres
Rosario
Green
©
Copyright 2024 by Rosario Green
|
Photo by
Umesh
Soni on Unsplash |
Let
me offer a little personal history. I come from the poorest of
families where we lived in a rural town in the Philippines called
Dumalag. I have 11 sisters and brothers which sure made it more
difficult for us to get by.
Because
we had such a large family, we struggled to meet the most basic
needs, such as clothing, food, and shelter. Some days we didn’t
eat at all, or subsisted only on rice. All the older children in our
family had to quit school for one or more years to help take care of
our younger siblings while our parents worked.
One
of my sisters had to interrupt going to college for five years to
help our family. When she resumed her education, it was very
difficult for her to reacclimate to studying and passing exams and
she almost dropped out of college for good. But she persisted and
received her college degree and became a successful accountant.
I’ve
always been aware that my parents had progressive views when it came
to their children and preparing them for their future occupations.
My
parents allowed us the most precious of things--education. That was
one of the best gifts they could give us. Education was not a gift
coming in a gilded box complete with wrapper and ribbons, but a gift
allowing us to have a better future.
Despite
their hardships, I’m very proud of how my mother taught us to
be honest, strong, hardworking, and loyal to our job. She worked as a
housekeeper from Monday to Sunday where she left home every day at
5:30 a.m. and didn’t arrive back until after 8 at night.
My
father drilled in us the importance to be patient, honest, resilient,
and to have a love for education as the means to a better life, even
as he was a farmer who toiled in the fields every day where the
temperature outside often reached 95 degrees or more. My parents
guided us, not merely by words, but by the example of their own hard
manual labor striving to give all their children a better life.
My
siblings and I had to contribute too by working in the rice, sugar
cane, and corn fields for us to grow the basic staples of food. We
also had to do our own part-time housekeeping jobs.
While
going to college, my older siblings worked housekeeping jobs in
Manila, the capital of the Philippines, 200 miles away from our
hometown. Everyone did their share to survive and go to school.
This
next part of my story might come off as funny, or as morbid humor to
show how my family tried to make ends meet. Sometimes I paid our
tuition fees for school with coins or change made from my father’s
earnings from the Filipino “tuba” (a word from the
Philippine Visayan dialect which means the liquor from the coconut
tree) and put it in the “alkansiya” (piggy bank), made of
bamboo. He kept the piggy bank atop the coconut tree that he climbed
every morning and afternoon to gather the tuba.
In
discussing my family’s challenging situation, another story I
remember from my childhood reached almost depressing-comical depths
involving my interest in playing volleyball with other kids my age.
This occurred when my uncle retrieved some sneakers from the trash
can because he didn’t have the money to pay for a new pair. He
proceeded to paint them white because that was the color the sneakers
were required to have in order for me to join my elementary school’s
volleyball team.
I
promised my mother when I was in my third year of high school that I
would help uplift our family from poverty. I promised her this, not
because I was embarrassed to be poor, but because my mother didn’t
have the chance to enjoy us, her children. She was always working for
somebody else’s family.
It
was as if she didn’t know her own kids. I used to see my mother
hugging and holding the children of her employer and even now, I
still remember feeling sad and confused and asking why my mother
seemed so happy holding and taking care of them and not us.
I
made this pact with myself that someday my parents would enjoy and
spoil their own grandchildren. I would give my parents the
opportunity to experience the happiness of being parents through
their grandchildren because it was too late for them to be caring
parents of their own grown children.
I
don’t pray to a higher power to give me a great job and to be
rich and famous, but to give me strength and guidance to earn a
living so I can send my younger nieces and nephews to school. I want
them to experience what I have experienced in earning a college
degree and getting a good job.
In
spite of the worst external circumstances that we in the Philippines
have been forced to experience--war, famine, abuse, societal
collapse, natural disasters, ecological devastation, and to quote
what someone once called “the soft bigotry of low
expectations”--human beings can get through anything as long as
we’re all in this together. As Benjamin Franklin, one of the
Founding Fathers of the United States, declared, “We must all
hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
Whenever
I travel from America where I now live to visit my family in the
Philippines, I encounter the trees with green leaves and flowers
blooming all over the country. I believe that the recovery process,
after the Philippines is regularly hit with natural disasters such as
earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, deadly flash floods and
typhoons, surely becomes successful because of everyone’s
effort to pitch in to make the best of the situation.
It
only proves the theory that the smallest help counts. If I can cite a
metaphor, it’s the image that if everyone will light even a
little candle, the whole world will be brighter.
Rosario
Green was an elementary school teacher in the Philippines. She now
works as an administrative assistant for an insurance company in
Washington, D.C.
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