THE PAIN THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

Barely a week after my graduation at Payao Elementary School, in Binalbagan, Negros Occidental, our family migrated to the Land of Promise - Mindanao, to search for a better life. The year was 1966, we left negros Island penniless, my father - orphaned at an early age and just a "sacada", a sugar land worker in a hacienda - has no savings much more properties to sell for this migration. My father have just enough money for food and fare for our family of eight. From our barrio, we traveled by land via Bacolod to Dumaguete in Negros Oriental then by sea to Cagayan de Oro City then by land to Wao, Lanao del Sur and a week later after we left Negros Island, we arrived in a government land settlement area in Sitio Tumbao Camalig, Barrio Banisilan, Municipality of Carmen of the then Empire Province of Cotabato.

From the vast plain sugar land of Negros, we settled in the fertile rolling hills of Banisilan, in the hinterland of Mindanao. We left Negros penniless and arrived in Mindanao with nothing except for our clothes, cooking utensils and farm equipment and a big dream of having a land of our own someday. Hoping for a better life is our strength to move in this new land, if we failed or if worse situation comes to worst, going back to Negros is clearly remote and seems almost impossible, we have "no way out" so to say at the moment.

On the first morning after we arrived, I woke up so disoriented, so confused and felt so lonely that I cried after realization hit me that I am now in a strange land where everywhere you look you see nothing but large expanse of green rolling hills and a dark shape of a mountain in the far horizon. I felt so alone knowing that I am far away from my friends and classmates, far from everything that I've been used to in the past twelve years. It took me months to get adjusted to the new environment, to a new home, new faces of neighbors with different dialects, customs and traditions. I have to face new challenges in life, no matter how hard it is, after all I have my family - my source of comfort and strength. I worked in the farm like the rest of the children in the community, going to school is just an impossible dream at that time, we have no money to spare for my education, besides, the nearest high school was almost twenty kilometers away. Months later, I asked my parents to buy me a piglet for me to raise and to allow me to save part of my earnings from working at our neighbor's farms. It was my plan to go back to school. By the end of the year, I was able to save P103.00 pesos from the sale of my pig and harvest earnings. With the meager amount in hand, I was able to enroll for my first year in secondary education at La Purisima High School, a Catholic run educational institution at Wao, Lanao del Sur. Like the rest of people that time, I have to travel on foot the almost 20 kilometers distance in coming to school and in coming home during weekends.

After a year, everything went quiet well for our family, we now have a new house, a parcel of land to till, my younger siblings in elementary school and me in high school. Until one day in mid-1968, armed conflict erupted between the Muslim armed group and the Christian settler defenders. The once peaceful land we have settled, now became a land of chaos, of fear and uncertainties. We are often awaken at night by staccatos of rifle fires and dark nights are often lighted by burning houses and crop lands, by day smoke can be seen from afar, smoke of smoldering homes and burning crops. The situation demanded our family to migrate once more, this time not for economic reason but for security reasons. By October of that year, my family literally "evacuated" to Barrio Glamang, Polomolok, Cotabato. On my part, I refused to moved out with the family, I have to finished my first year high school before anything else, the reason that my family considered to allow me to be left behind. (My younger sister told me years later, that for the whole five months that I was left alone in Wao, Lanao del Sur to continue my studies, there was not a single night that my mother did not shed tears, thinking of her little boy all alone in a far away dangerous place.) I came "home" later in March of 1969 to a new place, to face new challenges in life, and once again losing my new found friends and classmates in Wao. Another pain in my heart - which included another year of not attending school, - this time, however, with a consolation; I am now in a safer place with my family. It was another year of hardship with my family after leaving Banisilan, to start anew with nothing in hand but a resolve to go on with life no matter how hard it would be. One day, my father told us, we have to move to another place, this time at Barrio Sinakulay, Sambulawan, Cotabato to till the land of a relative, my mother's cousin. It was on February 1970 when my father and me went to inspect the land offered to us. We found it to our liking and two months later, our family "migrated" for the third time. This time we hoped it is for good. We found the new place an improvement from our previous "homes", the rice lands are fertile,n the neighbors - of different tribes - are kind and the peace and order situation is still normal. For the next two years, we cleared the land of shrubs and trees, constructed water impounding dams and canals, planted fruit trees and vegetables and planted palay during the wet season and corn during the dry season.

After three years of working in the farm, to support a now growing family, my dream of going back to school - at least to earn a high school diploma- diminishes from day to day. We still have no extra money to spare for my education and besides I am too old anymore to be with young boys in high school.

It was already late in the evening that night in May of 1972, yet I could not sleep, even the many weeks of fatigue, hunger and the coldness of the rain in preparing the land for the planting season could not bring my tired body to sleep. The rising fever and the pain I felt from my almost raw skinned feet and lower legs- after continuously submerged under irrigation water and abrasions from felt grasses - was so painful that for many hours I cried in so much pain. It was that sleepless and painful night that awakened me to change my views in life.

The following morning, with a heavy heart and still with a high fever and in pain, I told my family that working in the farm is not the best life for me and maybe there is still a better future in store for me if I will be allowed to go back to school. A week later after that fateful night, I took the entrance examination and enrolled to continue my secondary education as a second year student at the Notre Dame of Tacurong College, Boys High School Department, Tacurong, Sultan Kudarat. I was already 18 years old then in the midst of 13 and 14 year old classmates. And, from that day on that I set my foot back in school, I never once looked back nor dreamed to be back that night and to feel the pain and frustrations that made me cry. I continued my studies up to college as a self-supporting student (serving as a store keeper, convent boy, janitor and everything just to get a free tuition in college). I graduated seven years later - after a stint with the Medium and Small Scale Industries Coordinated Action Program (MASICAP) scholarship program of the government - at age twenty five, in March 1979, from the Notre Dame of Marbel College, Koronadal, South Cotabato with a degree of Bachelor of Arts, major in Economics.

It was that pain that changed my life!