Never Give Up: The Story of Lily

By Lily Lascoña

Although I was born into poverty, Id worked hard my entire life. As a child, I worked long, hard hours on the farm. As a youth, I left home in search of a better life for myself and my two sons, landing work that I was ashamed of to this day. After I came to America, I continued working hard to provide for my families in the United States and Southeast Asia and to bring my sons to America, where I thought they would have a better life.

My success in America stemmed in large part from my ability to care for people with severe developmental disabilities. With this talent, I built a company that eventually employed sixty-five people and provided care for dozens of individuals.

Throughout it all, I believed in family. In fact, I believed in the concept of family so strongly that, looking back, I see that it often skewed the reality of my situation.

In 2014, after illness and a series of challenges put my career as a health-care provider on hold, I found myself in extremely unfamiliar territoryI was forced to take a hard look at my life and reexamine my beliefs and values. And what Ive come to realize, in part, is that my fortune that I discovered in America has also been the root of my problems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503530089

Lily Lascoña

After being born and raised in poverty in Southeast Asia, Lily left home to seek a better life. On her journey, she experienced the pitfalls of life as a young girl all alone in a big city, bore two sons, was homeless for a time, married twice, and eventually moved to America, where she started and built a successful company that cared for people with disabilities. After illness and a series of challenges put her career on hold, she became an author by recording the painful reexamination of her beliefs and values. Today she is using her talent for providing care for people with disabilities by embarking on a second career in the field.

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Copyright © 2015 by Lily Lascoña.

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Rev. date: 12/26/2014

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 Life on the Farm

Chapter 2 Determined to Get an Education

Chapter 3 A Family of My Own

Chapter 4 A Difficult Decision

Chapter 5 The Price of Naïveté

Chapter 6 The Nightlife

Chapter 7 Moving to America

Chapter 8 A New Life in the American Midwest

Chapter 9 Never Enough

Chapter 10 Filling a Need

Chapter 11 Bringing My Family to the United States

Chapter 12 Enough Was Enough

Chapter 13 The Rise and Fall of Life House

Chapter 14 Living with Chronic Illness

INTRODUCTION

Although I was born into poverty, I’d worked hard my entire life. As a child, I worked long, hard hours on the farm. As a youth, I left home in search of work and a better life for myself and my two sons. In my struggle to find quality work, I often took on more than one job. After I came to America, I continued working hard to keep a roof over my head, to provide for my family in Southeast Asia, and to bring my sons to America, where I thought they would have a better life.

My success in America stemmed in large part from the recognition of my ability to care for people with severe developmental disabilities. Armed with this talent, I built a company that eventually employed sixty-five people and provided care for dozens of individuals.

Throughout it all, I believed in family. In fact, I believed in the concept of family so strongly that, looking back, I saw that it often skewed the reality of my situation.

In 2014, after illness and a series of challenges put my career as a health care provider on hold, I found myself in extremely unfamiliar territory—I was forced to take a hard look at my life and reexamine my beliefs and values.

As part of that reevaluation of myself, I put together this story of my life. And what I’ve come to realize, in part, is that the fortune that I discovered in America has also been the root of my problems.

What you’ll find on the pages that follow is my story as I recall it. I’ve changed the names of the people involved. My only intent in telling this story is to show how much I have overcome in life. My hope is that, in reading these pages, others will relate to my story on some level.

CHAPTER 1

Life on the Farm

I was born in a small town in Southeast Asia, but the majority of my childhood was spent on the family farm. From a very young age, all the children in my family were expected to help out on the farm with the cultivating and planting of corn, bananas, and vegetables. As one of the oldest children in my large family, it was also my responsibility to take care of the animals on the farm.

It was an impoverished life; many days we didn’t know if we’d be able to eat the following day, and often the day’s meal consisted of cassava roots or steamed bananas with sweet potato leaves.

Play was something other kids—like my cousins—did. My mother had many siblings, most of whom married into middle-class families. Their lives were completely different from ours, and I often found myself jealous of my cousins because of their nice clothes and the variety of foods they ate.

But my mother married a farmer, a man with no education but who worked hard and did his best to provide food and shelter for his family. For protein, my cousin on my father’s side of the family would often join us after dinner when we could go to the lake to catch some freshwater shrimp by using a bag filled with rice that we’d throw in the water for bait. These trips commonly kept us out until midnight.

On one of these trips, we decided to stay overnight so we could catch extra shrimp to sell and make some money on the side. I took extra kerosene and a lantern along so we’d have more portable light longer into the evening. I left the lantern near the campfire when one of the girls along on the trip got too close to it with some plastic; the plastic caught fire, and in her panic, she tossed it away—right at me. It hit me in the leg and my dress caught on fire, and I leaped into the lake, but not before it burned my leg. I still have the scar.

When I was six years old, my parents moved to a very small town. It was a remote, isolated place with the nearest neighbors a half hour away. During the day, my father worked at the farm, and at night, he made charcoal out of trees he felled, chopped up, and smoked in a large homemade vat. The house was very small. It had a roof made of a coconut tree, walls made from coconut tree leaves, and a floor made from a bamboo tree. There were no separate bedrooms; we all slept together in one room.

Every Friday, my job was to harvest the banana and cassava to sell on Saturday in the market at a nearby city. Around two o’clock in the morning, my mother and I would leave the house and walk for six hours carrying a basketful of cassava roots, bananas, and vegetables. With the money we made at the market, we would buy twenty kilos of grits along with salted and fresh fish, and then we would make the trek back home carrying the load. I would be exhausted by the time we reached home, but I wasn’t allowed to rest until I completed my chores, which included bringing in the goats and cows and feeding the pigs.

One day, my father was very sick and unable to work on the farm. The field had to be cultivated that day, so it was up to me to help my older brother use the water buffalo to till the soil. It was backbreaking work, but when we were done, I still had to retrieve the farm animals before I could call it a day.

Without electricity, we made up our own entertainment. At night, my brother and I constructed a television by creating human characters out of banana leaves and projecting them onto a white blanket illuminated with a kerosene lantern. During the half-moon, my mother would take me to the small river nearby to catch crabs for our family to eat; we were so excited when we caught a lot of crabs because it was a nice change from cassava roots and steamed banana.

My siblings were content and happy with the meager livelihood and long, hard days, but I wasn’t. At the age of seven, I still had not started school because my mother kept saying I needed to stay home another year to help my brother on the farm. At that age, I had no choice but to obey my mother and respect her wishes.

Finally, when I turned eight, my mother sent me to live with an aunt in the barrio. I was so excited because I was finally going to be able to go to school. When I first arrived at my aunt’s house, it seemed like it would be a better way of life because she bought me clothes and school