In Spite of the Headwinds

Early in the morning, I would leave my room and grab my packed lunch, which my landlady would place on a table in the backyard by the kitchen door. My financial situation was a concern to me because my extra cash had been used up. Three months into my undergraduate education, I came to a fork in the road and had to make the toughest decision in my life up to that point. I had to either drop out of college or cut back on daily meals. I thought of my determination to provide a better living for my parents and of the hardships my younger siblings would face should I not succeed and be there to help them when their turn to go to college arrived. With all that in mind, I concluded that I could not give up because my decision would affect more people than just myself. So I cut back to lunch only, and with that I was down to one meal a day.

I recall one evening during coffee break at the university, I was running on an empty stomach and could not afford to buy any food. Classmates around me were eating their juicy hamburgers or barbecued sandwiches, and I would go to the water fountain and drink a couple of glasses of water. On the way home from college, I would stop by the bakery and buy a six-inch loaf of bread. Back in my room, I would break the loaf apart, add a spoonful of sugar, and soak the bread in a one-pint container of water. Then, with a spoon, I would eat my dinner. On a full stomach, I would take a bath and go to sleep. When the water-soaked bread swelled and filled my stomach, that was fine, and I would hope to make it through the night. But sometimes I would wake up and feel like I hadn’t eaten dinner, which was true. It’s very difficult to fall asleep when you’re hungry.

One evening, in the class that followed coffee break, a classmate next to me was eating popcorn with cheese, and I asked him if I could have some. It was a normal thing for guys to ask for a bite of a sandwich, ice cream, or a little bit of whatever a colleague was eating. He promptly filled my hand with popcorn and cheese, never realizing that he had given food to a hungry person who had no money.

One Monday during our lunch break at work, I went to the company oven to warm my packed meal, since the company had no cafeteria. When I took my lunch out of the oven and opened it to eat, I noticed that it was the leftover pasta we had been served for lunch in the landlady’s kitchen the previous day. I would have been okay with that, but the pasta had gone too long without refrigeration. It smelled rotten and was dangerous to eat. Up to that point, my life had been filled with tough choices, but I had never faced a dilemma like that. I had to choose between eating rotten food or not having anything to eat that day. Fearing for my health but also starving, I decided to eat it anyway. The people around me might have thought I was eating the most delicious pasta in the world because no one could see in my body language what exactly was going on with my lunch. To my happy surprise, I did not get sick.

Through all these challenges, I never let my parents know how hard life was for me. They didn’t have the means to help me, and they would have suffered greatly knowing my situation and feeling their hands were tied. I was resolute in pursuing my dream—and if that was the price, I would pay it so that my brothers would not have to travel the same bumpy road. My mother had, in the past, offered to look for a third job to help me attend medical school, but I had dissuaded her by arguing that my teachers believed that, based on my grades, I would do better in engineering. Actually they had said that I would be better off as an engineer than as an English teacher, but I had wanted to preclude my mother from sacrificing for something for which I had an alternate and painless (for her) path.

Now that I no longer had my 401K and severance money to help, on top of my wages, the circle was closing in. I no longer had enough money to pay for school, transportation, room, and board, and I knew I had to try something different to get the financial resources that I needed. Back then I was no different from those people who barely greet God when things are going well. But when things are not going well, they talk to him twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.