VOF Week 2 ( Hope and Struggle)

Coming from a poor family, my life is colored with difficulties and celebrations of life. My father was a stevedoring worker and my mother was engaged in a small rolling store where earning a living is made of sweat and blood. I grew up helping my mother starting at the wee hour of the morning till nights selling food stuffs among ship’s passengers and workers in the port. With my frail body, I had to carry two heavy baskets in my left and right arms selling stuffs such as eggs, bread, soft drinks and cigarettes.

I felt no hardship but all fun especially when my food stuffs were all sold and I have to turnover my money to my mom. This only means that I will have money for school the next day. I spend my primary education in public school where I walked one kilometer everyday from home to school in barefoot. After my graduation in high school, I was fifteen years old then, I worked as a banana worker and I was one of the thousands of exploited workers of the multi-national corporations in the developing countries like the Philippines. It was hard labor and I learned the meaning of labor, exploitation and survival.

This led me more to pursue my college studies and dream of a better life for my family. I spent my college years away from my family at the age of nineteen years old and I became a single mom at the age of twenty. It was such a dilemma of choices for me at a young age either to get married and not able to graduate college or to have a kid out of wedlock, despise by the community yet finish my college studies and help my family have a better life. It was the latter that I’ve choose. It was then I realized how my parents love me so much and such love made me to struggle for more to finish my studies.

I finished my college studies with honors, a pride of our university. It was such a great achievement for me and made my family and friends so proud of me. However, I carried with me the fear of humiliation whenever I am confronted with a situation about my personal life. Until I married the guy who love me so much and made me so happy yet lasted only for four months.

My husband was a trade union worker activist was abducted by secret military forces and remains missing until now. It was so devastating for almost two years of uncertainty and despair. It was the darkest years of my life I supposed but it was the memories of him that keeps me alive. It was the memory of him and all the martyrs of the struggling people that give hope and light to my journey towards freedom and find my way in the Voices of Our Future,