TEACHERS
there are teachers who can make or break you.
i encountered a highschool teacher who had the audacity to compare me to my siblings "who were this and that while i was ONLY this and that"...if she just wanted to put me down, she could have done it straightforwardly. but noooooo, she further rubbed my inferiority to my face by measuring me up against my siblings. she wanted me to feel like a rag.
i hated her for that.
maybe because of that i became the epitome of the infamous (to our school) inferiority complex very much in vogue in highschool. i was very hard to deal with at that time...add a dash of teenage angst to the mix. phew, that makes me one hell of a teen.
i was just an average student (albeit with red marks in my maths) among the the selected few who made it to become highschool isko at iska. for me being there was enough. i didn't have to prove anything; i just wanted to have fun.
and i just vented out my frustrations to my journal. and my stories.
BUT then there was this highschool teacher who looked beyond medals and grades.
in her subject, we not only read literature (the prophet) but we also wrote our own literature.
and then she saw me.
she picked my story as one of the best in the batch and had it included in our literary magazine we self-published.
i revealed to her i already had two short stories published in a national magazine prior to our dabbling in literary writing. no one in our school knew that.
she encouraged me to go on.
probably, she thought i would have become a fiction writer. maybe i would have...but i realized i wouldn't be able to fend for myself if i just rely on writing fiction. i'm not that brilliant. maybe i would just opt for something else, i thought.
she had a one-on-one talk with me one day some weeks before we graduated. at some point we both cried. she prayed over me.
and now i want to give back to her the support she gave me 11 years ago.
i'm doing my best to help in raising funds for her heart surgery that she sorely needs even though i have little time to devote on it. without the surgery, she would surely die soon. her husband died two or three years ago. she has young kids who are still in school.
but we need at least half a million for the surgery.
when we were in highschool, she was also sending two dirt-poor kids to school even though she could barely make ends meet on a teacher's salary. she said she is not worried because God will always provide, especially for those who help provide for others.
and if the responses we're getting now is an indication of whether we can raise the money in time, then she is right: God always provides.
i'm going to visit her this saturday in the hospital, hopefully. i'll tell her i've finally become a writer.
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UP Rocks!!!
thanks for mimi and karl for the photos. you rock!
at walang kaduda-duda, kami ang nagwagi. go UP PEP!!!
