On Education: An enriching convo with Lady M

 
 

I met her through a friend who introduced us so I can help her tell her story. When I met her, Lady M was approaching seventy, and listening to her preparing for her highschool alumni homecoming was like listening to a spirited  seventeen-year-old who is preparing for her debut. So, I was thinking, she is really ready for this.

I was wrong. So she will be named as Lady M in this story to protect her family from unwelcome questions given the fact that the generation after her is all well-off because Lady M survived poverty single-handedly. Lady M, wearing her corn-colored brimmed hat and hugging her albummed photographs she entitled, The Journey of my Life, can easily be spotted as one of the senior citizens of the world waiting for her time to be heard because the succeeding generations are busy surviving their own poverty of any sort. Surprisingly, because I took time to listen to her, I was enriched.

She grew up as a seventh child in a family of eight children whose father was a brakeman of Victorias Milling Company and whose mother was a housemaker hooked with mahjong. When she was little, she accidentally drank a kerosene gas at their home, almost raped by a relative whom she was left to temporarily live with and finished her grade school in different schools because her parents moved around after her father retired from VMC.

When she finished grade school, she waited for her parents for two years to send her to highschool but when she realized that she could not be sent to high school, she resolved to implement what her elementary grade school graduation speaker told their graduating class. She was always reminded then to go to school always because she did not want to be like her brother who cannot read and write because he quit school after he was hit by a train by accident. On that graduation day, the message from the guest speaker was nothing grand but only in fact practical but it made a difference because it stuck in Lady M's young mind.  The speaker, as if speaking directly to Lady M, reminded the graduating class that poverty can never be a hindrance to education because one can always be a working student. So, she went to try her luck in being a working student in high school at 15 years old.

Lady M approached a religious school and when she was in, she took in all the hardwork until she finished high school at the age 21. During her stay, she was trained to do house work, office work and religious work so that she earned the trust and confidence of her superiors.

When she graduated high school, Lady M trained as nursing aid at a VMC partner school. For a semester, she tried to go to college tied up in a hospital in Cebu City. She did not persevere because it was the times when there was a shortage of rice all over the islands. It was the times when all she prayed for was, "Lord, help me survive by letting me eat for three times a day." Thus, she was not to go to college yet because she needed money for that, so she worked as a promo girl sent to various municipalities in Siquijor etc. doing house-to-house promotion of toothpastes, shampoos, soaps and the likes. She was somehow able to give money to her parents but proper work which will allow her to go to college was still elusive.

Lady M still did not forget her dream of going to college. Lady M went to La Consolacion College in Bacolod City and approached the sisters who already knew that her work ethics can be relied on. She went on to graduate from college, the only one among her siblings. She finished Bachelor of Arts major in economics and minor in cooperative.

When the sisters asked her whether she wanted to be a nun, she decided that she would like to have children. Her friends went on to become nuns. Fate has it that when Lady M was looking for a job in Manila, she met a guy who soon became the father of her two children. Unfortunately, the relationship did not work out  and they separated.

When her two children were to finish elementary, Lady M decided to entrust them to a friend in Victorias where the schools are just walking distance. By this time, Lady M single-handedly raised her children so she needed work to prepare for their upcoming high school.

In July 1992, Lady M went to Sister Ma. CA, LCC Order of St. Agustin in Manila to ask for a referral to work.  The latter told her that by August she will go to the US to carry the Inang Poong Bato of Pangasinan to a patroness there, and maybe she can try her luck there if she can go with her. Lady M went on to secure a visa and she was lucky to have been granted at one try. She accompanied Sister Alvarez who went back after six months while Lady M tried her luck in working any kind of work she can get.

In 1997, Lady M married an American US Army who had spent time during the Vietnam war. They have no children. When her husband died in 2008, Lady M found among his files a letter of prayer saying, "Lord, please send me a good woman." Their prayers are answered.

In 2004, Lady M met Sister Alvarez in Manila. She had her son and daughter migrate to US and they have their respective good-paying jobs and well-tendered families that the past struggles of Lady M seems like only a bad dream now.

There is nothing great in her story but there is this something extraordinary in her desire to pass on her story. Just like that of the graduation speaker, Lady M's story is addressed to that one child who had a dream amidst the challenges of poverty. Thus, to that child who can chance upon this story, make Lady M's story extraordinary by striving to finish your education come what may.   

Photo Credit: RJ Solidarios