Foot and Fire

    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 ...

The Promise of a Pencil: How an ordinary person can create extraordinary change Adam Braun with Carlyle Adler Scribner, 2014 324 pages I read this already many months ago. I just need to write something about it. This book tells of the journey of Braun from a promising wallstreet boy to becoming a CEO of a successful nonprofit organization which helps poor countries build schools as well as also engaging the community where the school stands. Braun is not only a dreamer but transformed himself as a dynamic leader along the way as he reach for his dream. He is also ready to learn from everyone he meets. Each chapter of this book is titled with a mantra. Among my favorites are “Do the small things that make others feel big,” “Tourists see, travelers seek,” “Focus on one person in every room,” “You cannot fake authenticity,” “If your dreams don't scare you, they're not big enough,” and “ Change your words to change your worth.” Just one warning: This book of kindness ...

Our relationship with our father was one made of love and hate. We loved him deeply for taking care of us first. He wanted to be a teacher but stayed in the well-paid job of being a policeman until he retired. He proved that work can go well with family first policy. That is why with his salary and loans and augmented by our mother's, he raised us all five children well with good education. He was a devoted husband to our mother, a gift he also indirectly showered us. He was a generous giver because it was a joy for him to give us P500 or P1000 every time he received financial blessings. He made our education a priority, a lifetime investment he staked in, that he even extended that to our relatives who wanted to study. He loved to put us to his “fattening” or “feeding” program because he enjoyed cooking for us because according to him we should be well-fed and not sickly (and grow up tall), a way of living he shared with us until he was diagnosed with canc...

On the left is my Aunt Imelda who inspired this story  while the woman on the right is my mother.  Both turned 75 and 65 this year.  Photo taken in Taoist Temple in Cebu City last year. I was so sure that my father's zest for education led me to my profession. Become a lawyer so that your signature turns expensive, he would say . But it turned out that I was only partly correct. I learned later on that my story also started from my maternal side through my aunt. My lola married my lolo, who was ten years her senior, at the age of fifteen. They begot her in 1941. Being the eldest to a stern uneducated farmer and a chinese-garter-playing teenager was a challenge. As parents, they were unorganized, dominant, and unreasonable. It was because they were uneducated . My Lolo finished just his Spanish alphabet equivalent to grade one while my Lola, her grade three. "Education in my family is a family history. It is worth retelling to a generation which neg...