A Drop In the Bucket (part 1)

Alonzo De Torres was born to a family of 12 in Barangay Leon, Iloilo. He was the eldest son of sharecroppers in their locality.

Their area is mountainous so the farmlands aren't as flat as we know farms to be. Irrigation services are not free and comes from neighbors so that costs of mobilization is shared. He went to school in the morning and soiled his hands in the afternoon in order to bring home rootcrops as his salary.

Alonzo finished high school and came to Manila as a teenager in the 80s. He worked odd jobs and sent home a few hundreds of pesos every so often. Although he missed his family, he had a dream--to tow his family out of poverty! He finally landed a job as a salesman and earned a decent daily wage. His regular 1000-peso support to his family went a long way until his ailing father suddenly passed away. He went home to arrange a decent funeral for his father and comforted his siblings while worrying about his mom.

Alonzo was now the sole breadwinner. He encouraged his siblings to continue working on the farm as sharecroppers while attending the local schools in the hope that education might show them new opportunities. His mom tried but failed to live normally after the funeral. She followed the De Torres patriarch within two years.

Alonzo went back to Leon to arrange every single detail of the wake for dear mom. Now orphaned, Alonzo and his siblings planned their future together. They retained their ancestral home and four siblings stayed to take care of it. The others followed Alonzo to Manila to chart their own successes.