Escaping Poverty
65My father belonged to a brood of seven children who were raised by their strong willed mother in the La Paz district of Iloilo City. My father’s family lived by the railroad tracks near the public market where my grandmother sold sweet, golden mangoes for a living. I can not tell you with any accuracy how old she was when I first saw her, but by that time my grandmother already had silver hair. She was a small, thin woman, wrapped in her signature “patadyong” garb; hardly the picture of great will and fortitude, if one solely looked at her physical attributes but she was.
The place where their wooden house stood with its rusting GI sheet roof was part of the growing city’s urban slum and typical to it was the filth and squalor of an overcrowded and poor community. Heaps of garbage lined the side of the concrete wall that marked the boundary of this busy market and open sewers snaked along rows of houses ingenuously built from all kinds of materials that seemed to be without purposeful design.
The street where the houses of my relatives stood next to one another was aptly named Railway Avenue, a crater filled dirt road that lined the railroad tracks; dusty in the summer and turned into lakes of mud when the rains came. The railroad station was a short walk from my grandmother’s house and was the source of income by neighborhood boys who served as porters. It will take close to thirty years, two devastating fires and the closure of the railroad for the city to finally construct a concrete street that retained the same name.
At that time, many of the houses were elevated by wooden stilts with bamboo and nipa liberally used. Hollow blocks and concrete were rarely seen in this unpromising place. But when I first began visiting my relatives (in the mid sixties) my grandparents were already housed in a two story, five room structure made of hollow blocks and plywood with a concrete floor. This house was home to my uncle’s family who had an even dozen children together with my grandparents, my grandmother’s unmarried brother and a spinster aunt with an adopted niece who lived in an extended structure in the rear with its own room and dining area cum kitchen. This had bamboo slats for a floor raised to the second story level.
There was no indoor plumbing. Going to the toilet meant a short walk to an outhouse on narrow, raised boards which could be a dangerous exercise on dark nights. Water was supplied by a hand pump that was strategically located at the front of the house. By the water pump was a cemented, square floor where doing laundry became an excuse for the women to engage in gossip. But then this house had one distinct advantage: it had electricity. Compared with other houses in the neighborhood this house was definitely better than the norm. This was the La Paz I remembered over forty year ago.
My other uncles and aunts with their families all lived within hailing distance of each other. All had to contend with their own growing families whose needs had to be met and though struggling they had one clear advantage provided for them by their hardworking mother: they had an education and with it: professions and careers. This in turn provided the means to assure the opportunity for a better life not only for themselves but their children as well.
My grandmother was the driving force behind the successes of her seven children of four boys and three girls. Though my grandmother did not even finish an elementary education she realized the need for an education as the vehicle to escape the poverty surrounding them and she saw this realized in her lifetime. She was able to make her dream of a better life for her children a reality.
All her three daughters were public school teachers, the oldest daughter retiring as regional schools superintendent. Three of her sons served in the military. The eldest was a Constabulary non-commissioned officer who retired from the service after thirty years and was a USAFEE veteran eventually gaining U.S. citizenship. He returned to the Philippines and lived the rest of his life in comfortable retirement. He built a modern, single story, spacious house on the same spot where he raised his dozen children who were all present (some coming from the US) when he died early last year. He was almost ninety years old.
My father, who was the second son, graduated from the Philippine Military Academy and earned a masters degree from the Northwestern University in Illinois in Traffic Management and another masters in National Security from the National Defense College. He was already a senior constabulary officer when he met an untimely death from a stroke when he was only forty nine years old.
He was the first from his family to flee the poverty he was born into when he earned a scholarship to the PMA and spent his four years of college as a government scholar housed and fed amid Fort del Pilar’s clean and cool mountain air, far away from the filth and squalor of La Paz. My father moved his family to Manila in the early sixties when he bought a house in Project 6 a government sponsored housing for government employees further distancing himself from the poverty of his youth.
The third son was also a military officer in the Army Corps of Engineers who graduated with a degree in civil engineering and went to the Philippine Army’s Officers’ Training School. He retired from the army a full colonel and lived throughout his life in the very same place where he was born and raised. He saw the transformation of La Paz from slum dwellings to big, modern houses one of which he owned. A daughter now owns one of the biggest houses in the area. He was a life long La Paz resident who lived to see how education lifted this place from poverty into prosperity.
My youngest uncle was a bachelor until his tragic death in a helicopter crash. He was at the time of his death a senior executive for a government development agency based in Mindanao. He was an agricultural graduate from a state university in Iloilo City and had further training in the United States. I could proudly say he was one of the first overseas Filipino workers having worked for a large American agro-company and saw assignments all over Asia in management capacities. He proved that with an education a better life is assured.
My grandmother outlived two of her sons. She died seeing all her children pursuing careers and living better lives. She received from her grateful children generous attention later in life because of her efforts to provide for them an education. She led her children to the path of escape from the poverty that surrounded them by her faithful selling of mangoes in the marketplace; a daily ritual for her which lasted over fifty years. For an uneducated woman this was quite an achievement: to be able to give your children the opportunity to an education and hence better lives.
Only two sisters remain of my father’s siblings. Both live with their children and are comfortable in their sunset years: one supported by dollar remittances abroad from a daughter who is a nurse in Texas and a doting son who is an Iloilo city councilor. My other aunt is supported by and proud of her two sons both with thriving professional careers in Iloilo.
Today, my relatives have transformed that small corner of La Paz into a row of big, modern houses reflecting a prosperity that is not congruent to this place. With careers, professions and businesses the second generation, my grandmother’s grandchildren are definitely living better lives. Many have settled in the United States pursuing careers and professions but still some remain in La Paz, living the dream that my grandmother had for her children. I am thankful to this tiny wisp of a woman who gave my father his key to escaping poverty.
Our leaders should heed this lesson from an uneducated but definitely wise woman: the way out of poverty is EDUCATION. Our national priority should be to give our impoverished children the opportunity for an EDUCATION and with this an assurance for a better life.
