Along Came a Soulmate

By Armenia Jess

Along Came a Soulmate, the true memoir by Armenia Jess, tells the story of poverty, survival, faith, hope, grit and pure love.

Armenia was born in an impoverished village in Southern Mindanao in the Philippines. Her father passed away when she was only twelve years old, her youngest brother who was only nine years old, became the bread winner and supported her education through college. Later on, she met her husband who significantly changed her (and her family’s) life.

The book follows Armenia and her family’s bittersweet life experiences in the Philippines before she made it to the USA. Her family struggled to survive their impoverished living conditions and the cruel circumstances they encountered in a village near her hometown; when they left to live in the town to chase her dream only to be evicted from multiple rental houses they couldn’t afford to pay; and when she unexpectedly met the man who loves her unconditionally and showed her the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Jan 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781543756401

Armenia Jess

Armenia Jess currently works as a Program Development and Evaluation Analyst in an Oil and Gas Company in Saudi Arabia. She earned her Master’s degree in Business Administration (MBA) in Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and her degree in Bachelor of Science in Secondary Education (BSED) with a major in Physics in the Philippines. Her husband, an American teacher who opened an opportunity for her to travel the world, once gifted her with a copy of Frank McCourt’s book (Angela’s Ashes) and took her to Limerick, Ireland to visit Frank McCourt’s childhood home to inspire her to write.

Book preview

Chapter 1

In July 1985, Mamang, my mother, turned thirty-nine. At this age, she already had six children with Papang, my father:

My sister Layla was fifteen.

My brother Jack was thirteen.

My brother Odin was nine.

My brother Mico was seven.

I, Inday, was four.

My brother Paul was one.

At fifteen, my sister Layla was beautiful and was already a curvaceous grown-up young lady. She was very talented—she had a good voice, she was good at acting, and her English was excellent. The only problem was that she had itchy feet and was very determined not to remain in what she saw was a dreadful existence. She tried living in many different houses, constantly in search of a better life. She had lived with Mamang’s relatives and with Papang’s relatives. She had even lived with people who were not related to us. She dreamt of being successful one day.

She had just started studying as a freshman in a public high school in Marbel, our home town, and was working as a nanny for a family that had a small business in Marbel in order to earn spending money.

At thirteen, my brother Jack had astonishingly just survived severe anaemia. He was lucky that one of the wealthier families in our village had taken him in and had paid his medical bills. The family had temporarily adopted him.

At nine, my brother Odin was suffering from serious ear infections, and a foul-smelling liquid dripped out of his ears. The steady leaking and bad smell led to a lot of bullying from his classmates, and the never-ending torment drove him to stop going to school from time to time.

At seven, my brother Mico was probably the healthiest child amongst all of us. His appetite was incredible. He was very self-assured and dreamt of becoming an expert in martial arts.

At four, I never left Mamang’s sight. Despite my annoying overbite, I felt very content and happy. I was very excited about starting school soon because I could already read and write both in Filipino and English, and I simply loved mathematics.

At one, my brother Paul was the cutest child in the world. He was the sunshine of the entire family.

At thity-eighth, Papang had already tried many different jobs but hadn’t had a permanent job. Sometimes he would work as a labourer at one of the rice mills in town. Sometimes he would work on road construction projects. Occasionally, when the bridge was damaged by floods and heavy rains, he would work as a dispatcher to facilitate the transfer of vehicles from one end of the bridge to the other and vice versa. Occasionally, he would do some farming or fishing.

We lived in Barrio Sais, in a small village which was about fifteen minutes away from the centre of Marbel. Our house was located on a cliff overlooking several different views.

The left side of the cliff overlooked a canal, the house of Uncle Ponsing (Papang’s brother), and the bridge that crossed over the river.

The right side of the cliff overlooked a huge rice farm, a fish pond, a spring, and a well.

The centre of the cliff overlooked the river as well as many houses on the other side of the river.

We didn’t own the land but were allowed to build our house on it because my family were tenants on the land, helping the owner look after his properties. The owner lived and worked overseas.

At the back of our house, we had a small garden in which were planted different kinds of tropical vegetables. We also had some fruit trees, a lot of bamboo trees, and coconut trees. One of the coconut trees was as old as me; Layla planted it when I was born. The land at the back of our house adjoined my grandparents’ land. Thereupon grew sweet potatoes, watermelons, bananas, cacao, and many other crops.

When I was four, life in our village was simple but happy. Few of the houses had electricity, so we went to bed early. We ate primarily fresh, organic food. Kids were very carefree and ran barefoot through the fields and village.

At a young age, I learnt that having a big family could be a good and a bad thing. Auntie Lilian, one of our neighbours and a good friend of Mamang, had eighteen children with Ponso, her husband. Auntie Lilian’s children were not interested in going to school. They were more interested in helping their parents earn a living. The children grew up toiling alongside their parents as farmhands on the farms of people who were considered to be luckier than most of the other villagers in our village. Her family worked together as a team, preparing the fields for the planting season, planting the crops, and finally, harvesting them at the end of the season. In return, they were usually paid some money or given a portion of the crops they harvested that they could either eat or sell in the market in the nearby town.

Auntie Lilian once invited me to spend an evening at her place, and I saw how having a big family could be a good thing. Auntie Lilian and her extra-large family had a lot of respect for each other and seemed quite happy and content. All members of the family contributed something to the table at the end of the day; thus, there was always plenty of food. Their way of living was also very humble and very similar to our own way of life. The family sat and ate their meals on the bamboo floor. They didn’t use knives, forks, and spoons when they ate; they used only their hands. Their house was a traditional nipa hut.

The roof was made of coconut and banana leaves. The walls were made of split and woven bamboo, and the floor was made of bamboo slats. There was only one large room, no separate bedrooms or living room. At night, the whole family slept on straw mats. Blankets were shared, and as were the mosquito nets. Because they had no electricity, there were no televisions or radios, and kerosene lamps or home-made torches were used for light at night.

Papang came from a big family. He had ten siblings, and some of them lived within walking distance of our house. His parents had a strong house made of concrete and cinder blocks, and unlike some of the houses in the village that used kerosene lamps or torches, they had fluorescent lighting. My grandfather (Lolo) and my grandmother (Lola) also raised a lot of crops—watermelons, fruit trees, potatoes, peanuts, bananas, cacao, and much else. Lolo was a United States World War II veteran, and with his retirement compensation that he received every month, he was able to send most of Papang’s siblings to college even though some of them had to live and work in the houses of other more affluent relatives to make ends meet. One of Papang’s brothers, Zoe, was lucky to be able to work as an aeronautical engineer in Libya around that time.

I didn’t really have that many interactions with Papang’s family, so I couldn’t really say that having a big family was an advantage for them. That being said, even though I was only four, I was aware that Mamang did not have a very harmonious, meaningful relationship with Lola, and as a result, we were not permitted to interact with them very much at all. In fact, they were the last people we were allowed to make contact with during crises, such as the time when our house was ravaged by fire or the time Papang got sick, couldn’t work, and we had run out of food and essentials.

Indeed, the familial ties were tenuous at best. Once, Mamang mentioned an incident in which Lola had prompted Layla to clash with her. Layla had always been the gutsy one in the family and was always trying to run away from our home to a better life. She liked staying with Lola because they had a television, and from time to time, Mamang would fetch her and bring her back home. One day, she ran away and was staying with Lola, and when Mamang went to fetch her, Lola told Layla to stand up to her so that she would stop pestering her for good.

Sadly, Layla decided to prove to Lola that she would do anything Lola told her to do as long as Lola would let her stay in their house. She tried to fight Mamang and almost pulled her hair but failed to reach it. By then, Mamang had had several fights with a handful of people in the village, and her fighting skills had been mightily enhanced. She left Layla crying at my grandparents’ house.

After this incident, Mamang avoided any interactions with Lola and stopped talking to her altogether. Layla returned home a few days later once she realised that life in my grandparents’ place was not any better. Her story was that she had been treated like a maid and was forced to do most of the chores in the house. Of course, Layla had never been fascinated with doing household chores, and she had always skilfully avoided doing any at home.

Mamang did not like having a large family, although she, as was the norm, came from a sizeable family herself. She had eight siblings who became educators and military officers for the most part. I hadn’t met them as they lived in North Cotabato, which was quite far from our village, and public transportation was expensive as well as challenging and time-consuming. Mamang told me that from our village, she had to take a jeepney for about five hours to get to her home town to see her family. A jeepney was a popular means of public transportation in the Philippines. It was basically a minibus that had a rear door to facilitate easy pick-up and drop-off of passengers. It was well known for its crowded seating arrangements and could accommodate passengers inside and on its rooftop. Mamang didn’t mind the long journey on a crowded jeepney so much, but aside from her wanting us to meet her family, we simply couldn’t afford the fare for the jeepney.

When Mamang got married to Papang, her siblings, especially her sisters, were endlessly worried about her living conditions, so from time to time, one or another of them would travel to our village to check on us and to bring us supplies, but they never stayed very long. Even though the return trip meant a long five hours, her siblings always chose to return and eventually get home just before sunrise the next day.

Auntie Sally, Mamang’s eldest sister, visited us one time just after Mamang had given birth to Paul. During her visit, I heard Mamang telling Auntie Sally that before giving birth to Paul, in spite of my father wanting more children, she had begged her doctor to ‘fix’ her permanently to prevent any future pregnancies. This was highly unacceptable in Philippine society, and doctors were not permitted to perform this kind of procedure without the consent of the husband. Mamang was steadfast. After she had explained her situation to the doctor, he incredibly agreed to fix her. When my father found out about it, he was devastated, and they had a big fight.

Mamang’s family thought that her decision to stop having children was the only correct decision she had ever made. Although her siblings were always very generous and helpful, they held forth about the many mistakes Mamang had made in her life. It was because of these many mistakes that she had missed out on many opportunities to have a decent life.

She missed the opportunity to travel to the United States with a missionary couple who offered to take her there and to give her a college scholarship because she was scared of flying. She missed the opportunity to marry a wealthy Filipino husband her siblings had picked out because she refused to entertain several potential future husbands who would have been a lot better than my father as they were financially stable. She let her guard down and allowed Papang the opportunity to get her pregnant (whether accidental or not). She agreed to marry Papang and give up her dreams when she became pregnant. She agreed to go with Papang and live in his village far away from them. She chose to stay with Papang even after she found out that he had only finished fourth grade and was not an engineer as he had claimed when he was courting her. She allowed him to get her pregnant almost every other year, which resulted in her having six children. She chose to continue to live with him even though he wasn’t able to properly provide decent living conditions for her and us children. She chose to continue to stay with him even though he and most of his family had drinking issues and treated her badly when they were drunk. She chose to continue to stay with him even though he cheated on her and had an affair with Merry, one of the widows in the village. She missed the opportunity to marry the man she truly loved—an American pilot—because she had agreed to marry Papang because of the pregnancy.

Mamang was well known in our neighbourhood for being a tough woman. There were many times when Papang would come home drunk, and they would have arguments that would usually end with Papang hurting her physically and sometimes giving her a big bruise on her eye. However, Mamang would not let the sun rise the next day without making Papang pay for what he had done the night before.

On more than one occasion, I witnessed Mamang splashing a cup of hot coffee on to my father’s face. One time, I saw her slapping Papang on the face with a piece of rubber slipper. On these occasions, Papang meekly apologised to her. Papang was also probably the only man in our village who did laundry for his wife.

Although she did have a few very good friends in the village, Mamang was not a very social person. She did not go to weddings or birthday celebrations or other social gatherings in the village but did go to school meetings or graduations that she was required to attend. She stayed home most of the time, which I really liked because she was able to mentor me before I attended primary school. However, Mamang, more so than most mothers, was not scared to confront people who mistreated any of her children.

My brother Odin had infections in both ears for many years, which resulted in a smelly fluid leaking out of his ears. These infections had developed after Odin nearly drowned in the canal beside my grandparents’ place. Layla was carrying him on her back on the wooden bridge over the canal. She lost her balance, and together, they fell off the bridge into the water. Neither could swim, and Odin nearly drowned.

His ears started leaking the week after he had the accident. The fluid that came out of his ears was so smelly that even if Mamang bathed him every day before going to school, his classmates and even his teachers thought that he hadn’t taken a bath. His classmates bullied him so much that even though he did want to go to school, he could not stay. His classmates made fun of him relentlessly, and he would go home crying.

One day, Odin refused to get up and go to school. When Mamang asked him why, he told her that his teacher had bathed him in school whilst all his classmates had watched and made fun of him.

Upon hearing that, Mamang rushed to the school and cornered his teacher, and from that time onwards, the teachers were extra careful whenever one of my siblings was in their class. The teachers didn’t like us being in their classes either.

Despite our simple life, we managed to live happily in our village. Mamang and Papang made sure that we were well fed. In point of fact, we ate anything that grew in our backyard, by the river, or in the rice fields—it was organic and grew without the help of fertilisers or insecticides. The plants grew abundantly, and we didn’t have to cultivate them.

We ate a lot of fish—sometimes grilled, sometimes fried. But for the most part, we ate paksiw (fish cooked in vinegar, ginger, garlic, onion, and salt). Occasionally, Papang would buy fish from the fish market, but most of the time, my brothers and he would spear them at night in the river using only a sharpened stick and a kerosene torch. When in season and during weekends, Odin and Mico would catch fish from a small pond using a fishing pole or net. Papang also raised tilapia and catfish in our rice fields and harvested them along with our rice.

We ate a lot of steamed shellfish and snails. They were plentiful and lived in the river and in the fish pond. I myself used to gather them during dry season when the water in the river was shallow.

We ate a lot of vegetables freshly picked from our backyard. We grew a lot of bamboo and bananas, so we ate a lot of bamboo and banana shoots cooked in coconut milk. Morning glory and taro also grew abundantly in the fish pond, by the rice field, and by the river, so we never ran out of them. We also ate a lot of tropical fruits freshly picked from our backyard and from Lola’s backyard if she was in a good mood. We ate rice field mice and grasshoppers! Most importantly, we ate steamed rice three times a day.

Meat was a real treat. Occasionally, Papang would buy some beef or pork bones and use them as flavouring for the vegetables. Sometimes if we didn’t have fish or meat bones or shellfish, we would eat only rice with steamed sweet potato leaves flavoured with fish paste.

Mamang and Papang ensured that we got plenty of sleep. It was pretty easy because we only had a kerosene lamp to light our house, and by seven at night, the lamp would have run out of fuel completely. If we wanted to play outside, we played in the moonlight, or perhaps we would burn dried coconut leaves.

On schooldays, Odin and Mico had to walk a few kilometres to get to school and back home at the end of the day. They played a lot in school and sometimes climbed a lot of fruit trees on their way to school and on their way home. I had to help Mamang with household chores because Paul was still young and needed to stay very close to her. Sometimes I had to walk for almost a kilometre to do our laundry in a well, by the spring, near Lola’s house too. I had to walk there to fetch water for cooking and drinking.

Mamang and Papang had to get up very early to help Mico and Odin get ready for school. It was compulsory for kids to bathe before going to their classes, and as Odin and Mico had to be in school before seven in the morning, Mamang had to wake them up before six and make them bathe. This was very challenging for Mamang as Odin and Mico would often refuse to bathe.

By early evening, Mamang, Papang, Odin, Mico, and I would be so exhausted that we would be ready for bed immediately after dinner. Of course, when I say ‘bed’, I am not talking about a real bed. We never had a proper bed. We all slept on a straw mat on a floor made of bamboo. We slept under one mosquito net and had to share a blanket. We didn’t have proper pillows either—we slept on bundles of old, second-hand clothes. Mico and Odin slept beside Papang and Paul, and I slept between Mamang and Papang.

Most of the nights, we would have a good night’s sleep. Occasionally, however, Mico would have bad dreams, and he would get the bed wet—the straw mat, the pillows, and our blanket. When that happened, we would try our best to get some sleep, but it would be so cold that we wouldn’t be able to sleep. Mamang and Papang would simply get up and use a bit of firewood to make a fire so that Mamang could make some coffee. Instant coffee was expensive, and with Papang’s meagre salary, we could not afford it, so my siblings had to pick coffee beans from Lola’s coffee trees in her orchard. They had to dry them, roast them, and take them to the market to be ground. Sometimes we could not even afford to have the coffee beans ground, so one of us had to manually grind them using a traditional, handmade wooden version of a mortar and pestle. We didn’t have a proper coffee maker either. Mamang would simply add the ground coffee to the water in the kettle and let the water boil. Then she would use an improvised strainer—a used cotton cloth fitted into a rounded bamboo stick—to filter the coffee.

Having a delicious cup of coffee in the morning was the best part of Mamang’s day. She loved it. She had learnt how to prepare brewed coffee deliciously when she worked with the American missionaries in her parents’ home town during her high school and early college years. As I was very close to Mamang, I developed a taste for coffee myself. Whilst my siblings and most kids my age drank powdered chocolate or milk in the morning, I drank freshly brewed coffee. Powdered milk was very expensive at that time, but families whose income were below the poverty line were able to get it at the health centres for free. In our village, the elders believed that drinking hot milk in the morning was necessary for kids’ brain development—it would help kids grow smarter. The elders also believed that drinking coffee would impede kids’ brain development; therefore, kids were not allowed to drink coffee. As for myself, drinking coffee in the morning helped me stay awake and focused during the day. Mamang did not encourage me to drink coffee, but neither did she stop me from tasting it occasionally. As time went by, I got used to having it every morning.

Chapter 2

It was Sunday morning, and I was five years old. Layla and Jack were not at home. They were staying with Lolo and Lola. Odin and Mico were playing at the backyard. Paul was still asleep. Papang, Mamang, and myself were sitting in the front yard, enjoying our cups of coffee, watching our ducks, pigs, and carabao enjoying their morning swim in the river.

From the front yard, Papang saw a middle-aged man walking by the river, carrying a pesticide sprayer. I didn’t fully understand what was happening, but I did remember seeing Papang getting up from his seat. He looked very upset. He went inside our house and got his bolo, a large single-edged knife or a machete. In the village, every man had a bolo that was well-sharpened, prepared for anything. Guns were expensive and difficult to own, so every house had a sharp bolo. Papang had always made sure that his bolo was well looked after; he sharpened it every evening no matter how tired he was. Papang put his bolo in a wooden holder and hid it behind his back, underneath his shirt, and tucked into his pants. He then ran straight to the river. From our house, we could see him arguing with the man. Their voices got louder and angrier, and then we saw Papang running away from the man. When we heard a gunshot and saw Papang fell into the paddy field by the river, we all screamed and feared for his life. We all thought that he had been killed. Then we saw him get up very quickly, run towards the man, and swing his bolo swiftly on to the man’s shoulder. The man fell into the river. Papang dropped his bolo and then dragged the man to safety. Several male villagers then arrived at the river and took the man to the nearest hospital and Papang to the office of the captain of the village, who was the designated leader, decision maker, and peacekeeper of the village, elected by the men in the village.

Mamang, wearing only her house clothes, ran to the office of the captain in support of Papang. My brothers and I stayed at home, feeling very worried. We had already heard rumours that the man, named Rener, was badly wounded and that it was very likely Papang would have to pay the hospital bills as well as a yet unknown amount of money as a penalty.

Around noon, Mamang came home. She was very worried. She told us that we needed to prepare ourselves because our lives would likely be changing dramatically. She told us that the captain of the village had asked Papang to pay for the hospital bills and one thousand pesos (about thirty US dollars at that time) as a penalty for almost chopping off Rener’s arm. One thousand pesos was a lot of money to pay (roughly about ten days of work for Papang), but we could have managed it nevertheless. We could have just sold our pig, and that would have been enough to cover the one-thousand-peso penalty and the medical bills. Papang, however, was very principled and strong-willed. He argued that it was wrong for Rener to use pesticide for fishing in the river. The pesticide could have poisoned our water buffalo and pigs and ducks. Rener also had tried to shoot him, and he was just trying to defend himself. Papang refused to pay anything. Accordingly, the captain concluded that Papang needed to be jailed in town for six months.

Upon hearing this unfavourable news, we were shocked. Who would have thought that such a lovely Sunday morning that had begun so quietly could suddenly end in disaster? That day, I learnt how arbitrary life could be. Sitting on our bamboo floor, I glanced at my brothers’ school bags and books. I wondered if they would still be able to continue going to school. I felt worried and scared. I knew that Mamang did not have a job and that she would not be able to work as Paul was only two years old.

It had been a month since Papang had had that unfortunate gun-versus-bolo encounter with Rener by the river. Papang had been in jail during that month, and Rener was still recovering from his injury. Our life had changed drastically from being simple but happy to being poor and miserable. It had also been a month since Mamang had started working in town, doing laundry by hand for one of the wealthier families who could afford to pay her fifty pesos per day. Mamang’s body had shrunk. She went from being glowing and curvaceous to being pale and thin. She wasn’t getting enough sleep because of all the household chores and errands she had to do in addition to her work as a laundress.

She had to get up at 4.00 a.m. and make sure that we ate hot food, that we had enough supplies, and that our clothes were clean before she left for work. She had to be by the road as early as 5.30 a.m. to catch a jeepney into town. Transportation schedules were very unpredictable, and anyone who wanted to get to his/her destination on time had to arrive at the main road before sunrise. Nobody ever really knew what time the next jeepney or tricycle would arrive as there were no schedules or any other way of knowing their exact arrival time. There were not any telephones in the village. Mamang had to take either a jeepney, which would be about a fifteen-minute ride to her destination, or a tricycle, which would last about thirty minutes. This was taking into account all the stops that both the tricycles and the jeepneys had to make at different points along the road to allow passengers to get off.

She had to provide for Papang in jail. She had to go there very early in the morning before she reported to work in order to bring him food and clean clothes.

Whilst working as a laundress, she had to hand-wash clothes, hang the clothes out to dry, and iron them using an old-fashioned iron that used charcoal to heat it.

She had to visit politicians and to seek and beg for their help regarding my father’s case. The only time she could do this was during her lunch breaks.

She had to cook, feed us, and bathe us when she got home at night. She had to breastfeed Paul every night and before she left for work.

There were always times when one or another of us was not feeling well, and she would spend the night taking care of us. She would get virtually no sleep, but still, she would always get up early and repeat the whole cycle over again.

Mamang’s three siblings were officers in the Philippine Army. Lolo held a very high rank during his time as a US World War II master sergeant. Any of them could have helped Papang get out of jail if they had wanted to. However, they did not approve of Papang’s stubborn unwillingness to compromise on his point of view. The captain of the village had tried to settle the case amicably but had become fed up because of his refusal to pay the hospital bills and the one-thousand-peso penalty.

Chapter 3

Despite Mamang’s efforts, Papang’s situation worsened. His jail sentence was lengthened another six months because he had got into a fight with one of the other inmates and then had argued with the jail guard. Relatives on both sides of the family heard about this appalling incident and reacted very badly to it. They broadly cut all ties with us and expressly would not help us.

When Papang’s jail term was extended, Mamang had to work even harder and come up with new ways to earn money to get us out of this predicament. She had to save money to pay Rener’s medical bills and the one-thousand-peso fine so that she could convince the town’s mayor to help us settle Papang’s case. We had a lot of papaya fruit trees in the backyard, so Mamang started making atchara (pickled papaya), which she would sell to the people visiting the jail. The extended jail sentence and Mamang’s punishing schedule created a domino effect on the already dismal life that we were living in the village.

As I’ve mentioned, my brother Mico had a remarkable appetite. It seems that there was always an empty space in his middle for surplus food and that he was always hungry at any time of the day. I myself was convinced that the only time he was not hungry was when he was asleep. He was always the first one in the family to finish eating his share of food, and after that, he would sit quietly in the corner and quietly wait for someone to say ‘I can’t finish my food. Mico, do you want to finish this?’

It was a normal practice to divide the food equally amongst the whole family, and once someone had finished their share, they would have to wait for the others to offer you their share. In due course, I would always be the one who wouldn’t be able to finish my share of food, and I regularly and happily offered it to Mico.

One day, Mico got very tired of playing Tarzan with his friends in Lola’s banana plantation. He arrived home before lunchtime and ate all the food that Mamang prepared for lunch. Mamang was always prudent and would prepare only enough food for us five kids and Papang.

By lunchtime, the cooking pots were all empty. There were no traces of food left behind. When Jack found out about this outcome, he became furious. Because Layla was not home, Jack decided to