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I was born and raised in a farm at the outskirts of the village of Calamba in the town of Cabadbaran, Philippines. My father was a farmer and my mother took care of us children, while helping our father in any way she could to augment our family income. Being the eldest, my mother would request me to look after my siblings while she tended her vegetable garden at the backyard or wash our laundry in a nearby creek. Being in a rural area, there were no kindergarten schools where the kids could go to school early. Children would have to wait until they reach seven years of age before they could start grade school. When I was six, my father and I had a heart-to-heart talk. It was a now-or-never scenario. My father was trying to convince me that it was time for me to go to school. As if, should I miss going to school that year, there was no more next year to start school and I would be illiterate for the rest of my life. The following Monday morning, my mother accompanied me to school ...

Chapter 1 - Remembering My Grandfather

September 28, 2024

My grandfather never celebrated a birthday, for nobody knew when he was born---not even himself. All of those who had knowledge about his birth have already died and did not pass on that valuable information to the living. His baptismal name was Hilario and we called him Lolo Ayong. But neither did anybody know when he was baptized. As far as I know, there were only three people in the world who had no birth records and one of them was my grandfather. The other was a character in the Bible named Melchizedek and the third was a certain monarch in Central Africa during the last century---sorry, I forgot his name. When Lolo Ayong died in 1986, my father and I who were overseeing the burial preparation had a problem. We did not know what to put on the gravestone as his birth year. But my father came up with a very ingenious solution. My father recalled Lolo’s story that during the super typhoon of 1912, he almost died because the typhoon caught him alone in his fishing boat in the middle...

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Chapter 1 - Remembering My Grandfather

Table of Contents: Our Family's Journey

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