While my mother Mamay was still alive and at the height of her "career", she was the epitome of a successful businesswoman. She was at her "peak" when I was in grade school. You remember my tales of her wonderful sari-sari (variety) store where she sold exotic-looking vegetables from Baguio? Her mogul-like forays into the farms of Albay for pechay, mustasa and tomatoes? Our summers with ripe mangoes and juicy watermelons? Our fresh-from-the-market menus and recipes for sinigang, escabeche and estofado?
It was a time of plenty; I never felt so rich and wealthy.
But business endeavors have a way of going kaput. Specially if the business owner was not as savvy as my young mind thought she was. And in addition to declining health or maybe due to the downturn in her business, my super businesswoman of a mother, somehow lost her will to do business and live. In the end, when she died, her business died with her.
And my poverty began. I was just in high school.
I never felt so poor than when I had nothing to eat. An elder brother who "inherited" the defunct business from my mother, could not make a go of it. He would tell us (myself and two other siblings who remained in Albay with my elder brother and his young family) that we've only been able to eat all along because he was able to loan some money from one of his godmothers, she who owns a restaurant a few blocks from us. As it was, baon na siya sa utang. Even then, we would only have boiled eggs and rice. Sometimes, chicken in a soup, with the chicken so minutely diced up, all I could taste were the chicken's bones. Magdildil ng asin was not far-fetched.
We weren't used to eating grandiosely as we only ate simple things yet we also weren't used to anything less in terms of quantity. My young mind still has not fathomed the seriousness of not having enough money for food.
Not even money for school.
Once, a high school classmate wanted me to join him in a weekend trip to school for some extra-curricular activities. I so wanted to go but my elder brother won't give me fare money. He said there was no fare money for weekend trips to school. So I argued that I would still go anyway and just work around my high school classmate how I can get a ride back home in his family's car.
My college years weren't any better. My father was able to send me to school for the first semester of my freshman year. Even then, I had to get myself included in my university's socialized tuition fee program so that I will only pay a percentage of the school fees as opposed to paying the full fees. My level of povery determined the discount in fees I got. To be part of the socialized tuition fee program, I had to prove my family did not have the means to pay my tuition fees in full. We had real estate alright, but it only consisted of the land where my parents built their house. To prove it's the only one, my father had to present the land's title but he had to pay first real estate taxes that had been in arrears for many years to get certification. Of course, my youth once again failed to recognize the irony of spending money to get documentation fixed for a program that purported to support poverty-stricken students. I was admitted nonetheless to the program and went on to study for the first semester as someone my father sent to school. Though my tuition fees were scaled down, my father still had to pay for my dormitory and other school and living expenses.
The second semester was a different story. As I bade goodbye to the dormitory directress (who was also a nun), she asked why I was leaving. Simply I told her that my father will no longer be able to send me to school. She would have none of it and promptly arranged for me to become one of the dormitory's resident assistants (RA). I was yet a freshman so she only assigned me to do tasks at the dormitory office. But as an RA, I had access to all the privileges: zero tuition and miscellaneous fees, free meals, free lodging and a monthly stipend to boot. The stipend was so minimal, I usually took a bus across two cities to ask another brother for more allowance. I would have to maintain grades higher then 3.0 though and I could not have Incompletes or even 5s in any of my subjects.
I must have been good, I stayed as an RA till I graduated five years later. But still not without major sacrifices. But then, I have already started to become more mature somehow, and learned to count my blessings rather than to curse the darkness. [Mixed and conflicted metaphors, huh!].
My association with the dormitory directress and other RAs she helped, opened up opportunities for me to be of help to others as well. And to see how better off I was, relatively, than the poorest of the poor. One of them came in the form of an NGO that the nuns [the same group of nuns where the dormitory directress came from], managed. The NGO sought out really poor children to become beneficiaries of Belgians and even Americans and Canadians who would send twenty dollars a month for the poor children's school needs. These benefactors were recruited by a French-Canadian medical doctor/philantrophist who worked with the nuns. [He has since died though, although the program remains as strong as ever.] The children, in turn, only had to be in school and write their benefactors, letters about themselves at school or outside of school, at least everytime they came around to the NGO to get the cash from their benefactors who also sometimes sent stuff including pencils, books and clothes. We called the Belgians/Americans/Canadians, foster parents and the kids, foster children.
I was a volunteer at this NGO's foster parents-foster children program. As a volunteer, I mainly helped the children (and sometimes, their parents and indeed, families) write the requisite letters in English, and to translate into Tagalog/Filipino, the letters of the benefactors. These letters were either written in English, or in Flemish; another volunteer or one of the nuns would translate the Flemish letters to English for us English-to-Tagalog/Filipino translators.
Note that I was a volunteer at the beginning of the program; it was an excruciating process to get those kids started on letter-writing. For most of the kids, it was their first time to write a letter. But more than the writing ability and legibly, it was a tedious process to let them write with sense. I don't know why, but these kids would always invariably write, at least in the beginning of the letter and even after several letters -
Dear Foster Parent,
How are you? I hope you are fine. If you ask about me, I am fine too....
I may have considered myself maturing at this time, but I still did not have the patience that truly mature people should have, in having a better understanding of where these kids were coming from. Walang pamasahe. Walang pagkain. Walang alam. Magulong community. Mahirap na neighborhood. Broken families. Dysfunctional families.
The parents or relatives were no more any help. Some of them were as uneducated as their wards. Some more obstinate. Some with more issues than the NGO could address/handle.
It was however, a beautiful realization, several years after the program started, to see how the kids grew - not just in terms of educational progression, but more so in how they conducted themselves, how they looked more progressive every year, how some of them grew attached to their benefactors, and yes, how they wrote their letters. And indeed, how they overcame their initial poverty.
Just like the way I overcame mine. With a lot of dependence on the "kindness of strangers."
My own benefactress of a nun not only let me be included in her roster of RAs. She also sometimes asked her own family to shell out cash for my books. She also let me (and another sibling) stay at the nuns' shelter during summer months. Indeed, her generosity even extended to my sibling as she struggled with finding a job after graduation from college.
I myself found work right after graduation, as a teacher of Communication Arts for high school students. The pay was not much. I struggled to pay for many things - the long-sleeved shirts I had to wear to school, rent for the room I stayed in (I moved many times), daily expenses for food and transportation, including the infrequent after-school coffee and cake at a nearby bakeshop, gifts for a co-teacher or his or her son or daughter who was celebrating a birthday, automatic deductions for withholding tax, social security contributions, housing program contributions, retirement contributions....
Even with a job, I was still below or on the poverty line.
Wealth or a semblance of it, only started to appear on my horizon after about three years of being an Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW). It took the better part of my young adulthood to go from years of seeming plenty to being actually poor to gradually overcoming poverty to eventually struggling. They were years of paying my dues.
I'm in a better place now, charges of profligacy notwithstanding. But my conscience is clear. I never spent someone else's money. All the money I have spent were first earned or due me eventually. And I never only spent for myself. I have been generous, and I say it pride and with not a bit of modesty. For when you've been materially poor yourself, you know as much what an empty stomach on another person feels; you know how soon pangs of self-pity can easily darken one's once mighty hopeful outlook or crush one's once mighty self-esteem; and you struggle to think beyond yourself and overcome selfishness, greediness and the natural instinct to simply survive and self-preserve.
You learn to care. Specially for other people who were you once. You learn to be ready and giving. Whatever wealth you may have is fleeting; such wealth needs to grow by nurturing or sharing. You learn to be thankful. That by the grace of God, your ability to make lemonade out of lemons, also lets you make lemon meringue pies.
"Do not be afraid to be human today," or so did the poster at the NGO office proclaimed. I thought I did. Even when I did not have much (wealth, not humanity). And specially when I relatively have much (humanity, not wealth).
But my real pride rests in this - that even while I was poor materially, I never felt poor spiritually.
