RISE BEYOND
0%
RISE BEYOND
0%
Despite everything, I did well in school. I received recognition as an honor student. Those ribbons meant so much to me. They told the barefoot girl who smelled like fish: Maybe you can become something more. My mother dreamed that one day I would become a teacher. But I had another dream. I told her I wanted to become a lawyer. I wanted to help poor people who couldn't afford lawyers and who sometimes couldn't fight for themselves because they didn't have money. I didn't know how such a dream could possibly happen. We were struggling just to put rice on our table. But still... I dreamed.
I was born and grew up on a beautiful island in a small village in Surigao del Sur, part of Mindanao in the Philippines. In a family of ten children, I was the eldest daughter. To us, it was paradise—not because we had money, but because it was our home.
Our house was a small nipa house near the sea. We did not have much, but as a child, I did not wake up every morning thinking that we were poor. That was simply our life. And somehow, we were happy.
My father was a fisherman, and my mother was a housewife. Because I was the eldest daughter, I learned responsibility very early.
Some of my earliest memories are of going fishing with my father. Before sunrise, while other children were still sleeping, I would be with Tatay in our small bangka. We carried a small gas lamp and prepared his fishing tools, including a steel speargun and his flashlight.
My father would dive into the dark water with his flashlight and spear. Every time he went down into the deep sea, my heart filled with worry. I would wait and wait until, finally, I saw his head appear again. Seeing him come back to the surface was always one of my happiest moments.
My father was back.
Especially when he returned with fish, I felt relieved and happy. I knew what those fish meant.
Food.
Rice.
Another day that our family could eat.
After we returned home, I might sleep for only a little while. Then I would take some of our catch and walk around the village selling fish before going to school.
I walked barefoot.
After selling the fish, we could buy rice and other things our family needed. Then I had to go to school. I often walked to school barefoot too. I tried to save my slippers for school because replacing them was not easy.
When the weather was bad and Tatay could not go fishing, we found other ways to survive. We harvested bananas and cassava. We helped plant and harvest rice. We collected whatever nature could give us.
At night, Nanay sometimes took me to the muddy areas between the river and the sea, under the mangrove trees. We carried a pail, a small flashlight, and a gas lamp and searched for clams, small crabs, and sometimes shrimp that we could sell the following morning.
I remember seeing snakes among the mangroves and shaking with fear.
Nanay remained calm. She told me not to be afraid and not to touch them. She also taught me how to find shrimp in the darkness. She told me to watch carefully because their eyes would reflect the light from our flashlight.
Even in the middle of the night, my mother knew where to look.
I did not think of myself as hardworking then. I was simply helping my family.
Today, I realize that she was teaching me survival without ever calling it a lesson.
We had wealthy neighbors who owned rental cottages in our area. Whenever their children came home from America, we children became very excited. They sometimes gave us chocolates and biscuits, and our family could earn a little rice or money by sweeping their backyard and cleaning the surroundings.
But there was something else in their house that fascinated us.
A Betamax.
To us, it was amazing.
My siblings and I would watch Jackie Chan and Rambo from the veranda. If the door was closed, that did not stop us. We would find a place near the bamboo window where we could still see the black-and-white television.
We were completely absorbed in the movies.
There was only one problem.
Before we were allowed to enjoy ourselves, we had chores to finish.
Nanay would whistle for us. We knew that whistle meant, Come home.
But sometimes Jackie Chan was winning the battle, and we decided to ignore the whistle.
Then one of us would look behind.
There was Nanay.
And she was carrying a branch from the guava tree.
Suddenly, the movie was not important anymore.
We scattered in every direction and ran home as fast as we could.
I even tried hiding under the table. But there was no escaping Nanay. Sometimes our punishment was to kneel on rock salt. I cried a lot—but even my crying had a strategy.
In my child's mind, I thought:
If I cry enough, maybe my tears will melt the salt faster.
Every Christmas, my mother would buy us slippers, and we tried to take care of them. I would save mine to wear to school.
After school, the work was not finished. We had to walk about two kilometers to fetch drinking water and carry it home.
Every Saturday, we carried sacks full of dirty clothes to the waterfall, also about two kilometers away, where we washed them.
Our house was a small nipa house. Our life was simple.
But I remember us being happy.
Whatever food we had, we shared around the table.
Nanay also taught us to clean the cooking pots. Because we cooked using charcoal, the bottoms became completely black. She would send us beside the sea and tell us to scrub them with sand until they were shining again.
She gave us enough time to finish and come home.
We intended to obey.
But then we saw the waves.
To a group of children, those big waves seemed to be smiling at us.
So I convinced my siblings to hold hands. Together, we faced the waves as they came toward us.
We laughed.
We shouted.
We played.
And completely forgot Nanay's deadline.
Then Nanay appeared again.
With the stick.
We ran so fast that we even forgot the pots. Poor Nanay had to pick them up herself.
That made everything worse.
When we got home, my siblings quickly explained that the whole thing had been my idea.
They were right.
I was the eldest and the one who had convinced them to play.
So I spent a little more time kneeling on the salt, crying enough tears to make it melt faster.
As a child, I sometimes wondered why my mother was so strict.
One day, while walking with Tatay to harvest bananas and cassava, I showed him the welts on my legs from the guava branch.
I asked him, “Tatay, why is Nanay like that?”
My father calmly explained that she wanted me to become responsible. I was the eldest daughter. He told me I needed to learn to be polite, respectful, and responsible, and to listen when my mother told me something.
I became quiet and listened to him.
At that age, I could not completely understand what my parents were trying to teach me.
Today, I understand those years differently.
I do not carry these memories because I want to blame my mother. I embrace them as part of the childhood that shaped me.
Nanay was strict.
But she was also the woman walking through the mangroves at night, trying to find clams and shrimp so her children could eat rice the next day.
Life was teaching all of us how to survive.
Bad weather was frightening for a fisherman's family.
When my father could not go fishing, there might not be enough money to buy rice. I can still remember the sadness in my father's eyes because he knew his children might not have rice to eat.
But we found another way.
We harvested bananas and cassava. At night, we collected seashells using our little gas lamp. In the morning, we sold them so we could buy something our family needed.
Weekends could mean another kind of work. Sometimes Tatay took us to help people plant or harvest rice. Instead of money, we could be paid with grain that would eventually become rice for our family.
And sometimes we rode the carabao.
To us children, this was wonderful.
We were not thinking, We don't have a car.
We were thinking:
We are riding!
I begged Tatay to let me hold the rope. I discovered that if I guided it left, the carabao went left. If I guided it right, it went right.
I felt like I was driving.
For children who usually walked, riding that carabao to the rice field felt like having our own car.
We were proud.
We were happy.
One day, while watching Tatay climb a coconut tree, I decided I wanted to learn too.
“Tatay, I want to climb!”
And I did.
I climbed higher and higher myself.
Then I looked down.
I had a problem.
I knew how to go up.
I did not know how to come down.
I hugged the coconut tree and called my father.
Tatay did not panic. He calmly told me that the same way I had placed my feet to climb upward, I could use those steps to come back down.
Slowly, still hugging the tree, I followed his instructions.
One step.
Then another.
Until my feet touched the ground.
Later, I climbed again.
At the time, it was simply Tatay teaching his stubborn daughter how to climb a coconut tree.
Years later, I understood another lesson hidden inside that memory:
It is important to learn how to rise.
But you must also learn how to find your way when you need to come down.
The Night of the Typhoon
Then came one of the strongest memories of my childhood.
Around 1984, a powerful typhoon hit Mindanao.
Our little nipa house was badly damaged. Strong winds carried away much of the roof. Even the shelter for our chickens was destroyed, so the chickens and their chicks began coming into our kitchen because they had nowhere else to sleep.
Our family crowded together in the small part of the house that still gave us some shelter.
We ate what we had—even boiled unripe bananas with fermented fish sauce.
Strangely, I do not remember us children spending the night thinking that our life was terrible.
We were together.
That was enough to make us feel safe.
But I remember looking at my father.
His eyes were different.
Tatay looked through the uncovered roof toward the sky, and even as a child, I could feel his worry.
How would he repair our house?
When would the weather allow him to fish again?
And if he could not fish, where would our rice come from?
I told him we could go near the river and find nipa leaves to help repair the roof.
He told me to stay home and help look after my siblings, especially because we had a newborn baby.
But while my parents were busy trying to repair our home, my siblings and I already had another plan.
We would collect seashells that night.
We would sell them in the morning.
Then we could buy rice.
At around seven that evening, I asked Tatay if we could go collecting shells.
He allowed us.
I prepared myself.
My skirt was very old, and the garter had become loose, so I had tied another string around it to keep it from falling. Then I prepared our homemade gas lamp. I filled a bottle with fuel and used cloth as the wick.
I was only a child. I did not understand how dangerous what I was doing could be.
Some of the fuel spilled onto my skirt.
Then I struck the match.
My skirt caught fire.
The flames began climbing.
I tried to pull the skirt down, but because I had tied it tightly with the string, I could not remove it quickly.
Tatay rushed toward me. He managed to pull the burning skirt off and threw it outside through the window.
My siblings stood there, shocked and silent.
My eyes filled with tears.
My mother was angry and frightened and told me I had been careless.
But even then, one thought remained in my mind:
Tatay told me to stay home and sleep.
I told him, “No, Tatay. I'm okay. I can manage.”
And I went with my siblings.
At first, I carried the lamp and the pail while they collected.
But as the night continued, my belly became swollen and increasingly painful. Blisters filled with fluid appeared on the burned skin.
Eventually, I could not continue.
I told my siblings we had to go home.
On the road, I cried from the pain.
When I reached the house, I tried not to cry loudly because I was afraid Nanay would become angry again.
By around three in the morning, the skin on my belly looked pink and red, and the pain had become terrible.
The following day, I was left helping to watch our newborn sibling in the hammock. Even moving enough to pull the string that rocked the hammock was difficult.
The baby cried.
I wanted to help.
But my body hurt.
And because the typhoon had destroyed the chickens' shelter, the chickens and little chicks kept coming through the kitchen.
I remember lying near the doorway because I wanted the air against my burned belly.
Sometimes those little chicks would come close to where I was lying.
Everything around us was damaged.
And still, life continued.
Later, my siblings returned after selling the shells. They had bought one kilo of rice.
We had succeeded in what we planned.
There would be rice on the table.
But that day, I was in too much pain to eat it.
I drank water instead.
My recovery took a long time. For months, moving and bending my body was painful.
Eventually, I began going fishing with Tatay again, even though I was still recovering. I wanted him to believe I could manage.
Inside myself, I was saying:
“Tatay, I'm your daughter.
I'm strong.”
And yes, it was hard.
But that is not the complete truth of how I remember it.
We laughed.
We played.
We worked together.
We became excited about a pair of slippers.
A carabao felt like a car.
Big waves became our playground.
A coconut apple was a treat.
A Betamax through somebody else's bamboo window felt like a cinema.
We did not sit around feeling sorry for ourselves.
Work meant there might be something on the table that night.
Very early in life, I learned:
If we wanted to eat, we had to work.
So when an opportunity to earn something came, we embraced it.
That lesson stayed with me long after I left that little village.
School gave me another kind of challenge.
Sometimes other children bullied me because I smelled like fish. They did not know that before I sat beside them in the classroom, I might already have spent part of the night fishing with my father and part of the morning selling our catch.
I had only one school uniform.
Wash it.
Dry it.
Wear it again.
As I grew taller, we kept releasing another line from the hem to make the skirt longer. By Grade 5, there was not much left to release.
I could not always attend school every day because our family needed help.
The principal would call my father because of my absences. I remember how sad he was. He wanted me to study. But he also knew why I was absent.
His eldest daughter was helping the family survive.
And yet, there was something that made my father very proud.
Despite everything, I did well in school. I received recognition as an honor student.
Those ribbons meant so much to me.
They told the barefoot girl who smelled like fish:
Maybe you can become something more.
Being poor never made me ashamed of learning.
If anything, it made me dream more.
My mother dreamed that perhaps one day I could become a teacher.
But quietly, I had another dream.
I wanted to become a lawyer.
Why?
Because even as a child, I understood that some people could not defend themselves because they did not have enough money to pay someone to help them.
I imagined becoming a lawyer who would help those people.
I did not know how I would reach that dream. I did not know where the money for my education would come from.
I only knew that I needed to study.
We were struggling just to put rice on our table.
But still...
I dreamed.
One Saturday night during summertime, I was again at sea with my father.
The sea was calm.
The moon was clear above us.
My father and I were using the bugsay, our oar, to move our little bangka across the water.
Then an airplane passed above us.
I became excited.
I pointed toward the sky and told my father:
“Tay, one day I will be on that airplane. I will go abroad.”
Then I made him a promise.
“The first thing I will do is buy you a soft mattress so your back won't hurt anymore from sleeping on the bamboo floor.”
I saw tears in my father's eyes.
He answered:
“In God's will, Anak.”
And I told him:
“Yes, Tay. I promise. I will try my best to go abroad, work, and help you and our family.”
I had remembered the wealthy neighbors and the things they had that we did not—their Betamax, their beautiful car, their long tables filled with food during parties, and their children coming home from America.
I was not angry because they had those things.
Their life made me curious about what might be possible.
I asked my father:
“Tatay, how much do you think a Betamax costs? Do you think if I go on that airplane, I could buy one for us?”
Tatay told me that if I finished my studies and worked, with God's will, perhaps one day I could.
So I looked at those airplanes and dreamed.
One day, I wanted to ride one.
One day, I wanted to drive a car.
One day, I wanted to buy a Betamax so my siblings would not have to watch somebody else's through a bamboo window.
And I wanted to buy my father a soft mattress so his tired back could rest after all those years of fishing and working for us.
I had no map.
No money.
No connections.
I did not even know how those dreams could possibly happen.
I only knew one thing.
Somewhere inside that little girl sitting in a small bangka, a much bigger journey had already begun.
Then my father went back into the sea.
Again, I waited for him to come to the surface.
Again, my heart worried about him.
But this time, while I waited, my mind was still inside that airplane.
I did not know how I would get there.
I did not know how many years it would take.
I did not know how much pain I would experience before that dream came true.
I was simply a barefoot little girl sitting in a small bangka in the middle of the sea.
But for the first time, I could see a future beyond the horizon.
