Looking back at the early chapters of my life, I've seen nothing worthwhile but rubbish, hatred and agony. I was well-known for never being beaten even by older guys in a "taksi" (a game played in a plane earth-surface by placing a bet (money) in a square box and then aiming with all your might from a certain distance hoping that each strike will send all coins outside the box to win). And everytime I needed money, I would scout every stores in the market who has the highest buying price per kilo of rice and alas!….sold the stocks we had!. You won't believe it but with a cents, I had exchanged it with four dozens of biscuits. How the hell I did that? I called it Devil's guts! Ayo! Papalit og kendi (Tao po! pabili ng candy)… the store keeper approached me and handed me the candy and after I gave her the cents and since the drawer was a bit farther and she's walking towards it and I supposed she don't have eye on her back I took a whole pack of biscuits to the horror of my younger cousin while I afterwards was just like walking in a park. I was only third grader in Compostela then. In second grader, I had injured my back after falling from avocado tree and swollened that reduced me to almost hunchback of Compostela.hehehe. In fourth grader I had injured my right arm after falling from mango tree and since my parents were not around, nobody knew it. I had a short-lived amnesia once after falling from star apple tree doing a superman stunt as my brother said what I looked like. Quickly stand afterwards as if nothing happened and went inside the house to the horror of my mother minutes later because I was already crying from pain, from aftershock. We found out later I had injured a ribs.
My sufferings and agonies started when I was transferred to Catbalogan Samar in early November of 1998 when my father lost his job. My grandfather owns a coconut farm but since Samar usually was a pathway of typhoons eversince, most of the coconut trees only had a few every harvest. I was the oldest from four lads but usually outdone by them in physical labor. I was outdone in transporting coconuts from every now and then. I remember after my SOM life when I went to Davao and help my two brothers and my father did rice harvesting. They were so good and fast at it since they had been doing it for ages while for a guy like me it was a nightmare of a job. And to the horror of them all I was already crying from behind. I was crying because I pity myself, I'm not much of a help. My mother was probably right when she said that my body isn't suitable with the work we were doing. Sometimes my family would spend weeks staying in our farm at the mountains in Samar but we never stop attending school. Three of us would race all the way down from the mountain to go to school. I was even branded by a classmate who happened to be my crush a "Rebelde". Eto na ung NPA. And every Sunday I would spend my day selling all kind of stuff's at Catbalogan City (Pier Dos ata un)-down there everything sells. I was the only one from six siblings who had the guts to sell. My guts were so amazing even to this day because where I am now wasn't done through smooth rides and hitches. It took me a hell of courage and days of questioning myself "should I" or "better not" when the opportunity was right in front of me. I took the courage by offering everything to GOD thinking if whatever HE wanted so be it, my intentions wasn't for my own gratification anyway but for my whole family and the families surrounding me, and if HE wanted me to suffer, if that's the path HE had long laid down for me then why would I care so much about being shorthanded in everything. I was an undergrad when all they wanted was a college professional. Some may argue that I had outwitted the others but for me I was just playing fairly enough from this so called unfair battle-field earth.
After Catbalogan, Samar we were all transferred to San Juan. Hilongos Leyte as the Family grew weary of the life in the mountains where we achieved nothing but same old pains and hardships. What we found out in Leyte weren't much of a difference. It was even worst since we don't have anything in Leyte. We had experienced where we had nothing at all in the table and being the oldest son I took the initiative and it was there in Leyte where I had almost given up. I was thinking of abandoning the whole family to fend for my own and survive. Believe it or not but if some of you were familiar of rice milling machines in the provinces where the waste rice hulls usually just dumped backyards of the factory, my mother ask me out of desperate measures to filter rice hulls hoping to find some (ulon ulon) as what they call it in Bisaya (don't know what's the Tagalog term – I'm sorry). It's not the usual whole grain of rice but tiny particles as a result of too much friction from machinery (hope you got the picture). Know what? I found nothing. It was the most embarrassing time of my whole childhood, the very first time I felt I was humiliated so much. And it was right then that I've realized I just can't simply leave my good mother behind. Mama's boy pa naman ako.hehehehe…it was very humiliating really, we slept with just cardboard to protect our back from the beating colds of the floor in an old house ruled by gigantic lizard at night as big as four fingers combined. And the only thing I was proud of was a Mighty Kid shoe bought by my father when he still had better jod in Davao, at times where he used to send us and our cousins altogether to school every morning and fetched everyone of us in the afternoon, at times where I spent in a day an equivalent of week long "Baon". Aside from the lonely mighty kid shoe….nothing else. I wasn't even so proud being born, I guess because I sometimes thought I should have never been in this world after all. I had been doing a man's labor at grade five with only 7 pesos per day in Samar. It was so terrible.
When the opportunity for an SOM stint arrives, I went there but I had no idea at all or whatsoever. It was funny since I was only copying the answers of my older sister but it was only I who passed while she herself failed. The fact that I don't even know the answer to "what is the color of the grass" question baffled me even more. Guess what? My choices that time was violet and brown..hahahaha..and I just asked my sister afterwards for the right answer tto my embarrassment when sje said "green".di ko nacopya sa kanya yon eh. The only English I knew and I can exactly remember then was "mommy I'm hungry" taught by our grade five teacher in Samar. Aside from the failing grades in elementary and with almost no skill and talent at all I had no idea that there was even a GOD behind everything who made it all possible for me. I prayed of course but not to the extent that I know who HE was and where HE came from. At SOM, I used to cry a lot for months, as expected from being a mama's boy as I was. I even cried if my mother leaves our house leaving me behind and I will never ever let go of her as a leech will never ever leave their prey unless my mother would say okay let's go, how much more being an island away. I remember my mother told me months ago that when the boat that would take us from Hilongos to Cebu was about to leave, I run outside crying, hugging my mother murmuring between my sobs "I'm not going". BIYA-HILO pa ako….haaaayyy…suka to the max.hahaha. But not anymore, not this time.
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