Foreword
I have known
Aurora or Au, as we called her then, for a very long time. Not only did I know
her personally, we were also very close. We taught in the same school in a posh
village south of Manila about 20 years ago. I knew her as we were always
together with our common friends practically every day during those years. Even
more so, I saw the love blossoming between her and her then husband to-be.
Hence, I knew her like the palm of my hand, or so I thought. That was until I
got to read her book. What a revelation it was! None of those written in this
book were known to me nor to her closest friends in school. Nobody knew. She
kept every- thing from us and neither anybody knew nor will ever know why people
are just different from each other, I guess. Had I known what I have discovered
reading her life story, I would not have hesitated to extend help to her had
she asked for it. The things she had to endure were so intense that anybody
with a faint heart would have
given up a
long time ago.
From the day
she was born, Au had been living a life of discomfort. To make a difficult
existence even worse, one by one, the hurdles she had to overcome became harder—the
cross she carried got heavier by the years, just waiting for her to be nailed
on it. Using a deck of cards as an analogy, she was dealt a shitty hand of
cards. Worse, she was thrown several curve balls to boot, enough to make her
life miserable by any ordinary individual’s standards. However, she was far
from ordinary. Armed with a brain she learned to nurture with beautiful
thoughts, developed the perseverance to study hard and hone her intellectual
skills, coupled with a strong resolve and wily wit to beat the odds, she survived
them all. She knew how to play the bad hands she had been dealt with, managed
to stay afloat and even won in the end.
While on the
surface, this book is about Au and her travails in life, one has to read it on
different levels. First and foremost, it tells us how to live poor in an
already poor country. Being bad enough to live in a land full of wants; to live
in utter deprivation in such a horrid place is unthinkable. Second, through
this book, one gets a glimpse of the Filipino culture and how Filipinos thrive
in spite of having to eke out a living. In a land where there is a great divide
between the haves and have-nots, it is impossible to see how different one’s
world is from those with plenty and view life with a lot of envy. Not my Au
though. She was content with what she had and grew up not wanting what she
cannot have—material things that is. Third, the reader will know that one of
the distinct characteristics of a Filipino is to learn how to look at life with
humor. Dubbed as one of the happiest people on earth, Filipinos have learned to
laugh at
themselves and their misfortunes. This feature is very evident in Au’s writing
as she narrates how poor her family was, yet she injected humor in the
narrative giving away how she managed to look at life. Lastly, being religious,
a believer of the Catholic faith and devoted to the Virgin Mother, she had surrendered
everything to the Lord, but unlike the fanatic, she does so only after having
done what she
thought she
had to do. These levels are manifested either explicitly or implicitly
throughout the pages in this book.
It has been
said that we can only truly appreciate the blessings in our lives after we have
suffered and worked hard for them. We tend to ignore the pleasures and benefits
of life when these are given
to us on a
silver platter. Au has had one misfortune after another throughout her life,
and she had avowed that all sacrifices and everything she did were all for the
love of her Creator. Luckily, her tables have turned,
and she now reaps the benefits after a long, arduous life of misery. That is my
only consolation after having read her life story—it seems that the trials in
her life are now over. It is now time to reap the right to enjoy the remaining
years of her life, hopefully, for a very long time—even a lot longer than the
years of her suffering. Let this book be an inspiration to everyone knowing
that no matter how dark the tunnel of life may be, it has to end somewhere, and
at the end is an illuminating light, radiant and bright enough to guide our
paths with clarity no matter how long the journey shall be.
Rolly S. delos Santos