XI. ADVICE FROM A FAILURE

          I could have been a successful engineer had I stayed on with my contemporaries. Most of them are now project managers or private contractors. Some have migrated abroad while some still contract workers abroad. Financially they are better off, they look fine so I guess they're all fine. Being a member of the same batch of cadet engineers in 1982, I could say that I am at par with them in terms of intelligence but maybe I was just a little short in terms of patience and persistence. The MWSS  years were all but a launching pad for all of us after all the Marcos project were scrapped and the best way out was to work abroad for greener pasture.

      All of them were nursing a dream of making it big someday and build the foundations of that dream. But for me, I see it as an exile away from the family that I love and the promise of dollars to be earned could not dampen the thought of not seeing my wife and my kids for years. I was married, they were not - I am having the fun of my life enjoying every moment and I just couldn't step away from all those comforts of home with a promise of better harvest. Besides, things were doing great and my little business was flourishing. Who would ever thought that they were about to end.

      To make a long story short, we lost everything. It also caused me to the trust of my brothers and sisters and my parents as well for they found it more convenient for them to believe the scenario painted by my other sister. No one bothered to check the facts and uncover the truth so I have no other recourse but to detach myself from them and start building from what we have left. A great distance separate us anyway and they would be better off without me. It was a real hard climb for us and in the last 20 years we haven't even gotten back to the point where we could have our heads above water. But those 20 years was the most colorful part of our lives - you spend 20 years barely eking out a living yet managed to to squeeze in some fun along the way -  the rest of the way is easy.

        It is a lot easier to level down a house and build a new one than trying to rebuild a house that is about to fall down. So much had been said in those span of  years and though those words were forgiven the scars remain. Its like an amputated finger, the pain is gone and healed but each you see the part where the missing finger used to be you remember the pain. My kids are lucky for they could start a new generation of their own, with them and their would be families to avoid the mistakes we made. Its not about the question of hating the past, its gone and they could learn from it, its all about painting a better picture and building better roads for the next generation.