It was one of those afternoons when things couldn’t get much worse. You just want to go home, have a good sleep, hoping that when you wake up, all your worries would be gone. I lost my phone, it was raining and I didn’t have an umbrella or a jacket to put on, and I was feeling dizzy after spending quite a time in the shopping mall looking for a dress that would fit me (that was a Herculean task, considering my size). A bad day, yes. And then, that Katipunan jeep arrived.
When I got into the jeep, an old woman whom I came to know later as Lola Angela, told me to watch out for her feet and be careful not to step on them. I stepped the farthest I could from her feet, so did everyone else in the jeep. I sat directly across her. I looked down and saw that her feet were badly swollen. They were almost black and they looked really bad. I cringed at the first sight of them and I couldn’t help but feel for her.
It was a 20-minute ride from the UP Diliman campus to Katipunan. When we reached the terminal, Lola Angela asked me to go down first so that I could assist her to alight. I could tell she was in severe pain. She could barely carry herself. I grabbed her by the arm as she descended and asked where she was going. She told me she had to cross the overpass. There was no way on earth she could do that by herself, I thought. There are three staircases before you get to the top, and three more down. She told me to just go home and that she would just be a burden to me. But I insisted on helping her notwithstanding her remonstrations.
Lola Angela clutched onto me as I helped her climb the stairs. With just a slip of a hand or a jerk of my body, she could fall. She had practically entrusted her life to me for that arduous crossing.
All the while, she asked me lots of questions, like if I was studying at UP and what my course was (I had to lie here. I told her that my course was English though there’s no such thing. I thought that if I would tell her I was taking up Linguistics, it would spur more questions and require more explanations.) She then told me that she was in her 60s and she had no husband. I asked her what the problem with her feet was. From what I understood, the veins were clogged and she needed to have an operation soon.
As we stepped down the final rung, she told me to stop for a while since she was very tired. A one-minute walk on the overpass for someone without a handicap was a long journey for Lola Angela. And with that journey she shared with me, I saw things from a different perspective. I saw people who were genuinely willing to help, and who didn’t care about the people around them. Things are different when you slow down. You notice the little things that you normally won’t when you’re too preoccupied with school and a busy life.
Before we parted, she said that she was very thankful for having met someone like me and she would always pray for me. She told me that every night, she prayed to God that He may send someone to help her. “He sent you,” she said. I managed to hold back my tears and for a few seconds turned from her to gather myself. When I faced her again, she kissed me on the cheek and thanked me incessantly. Before she rode the tricycle, she said, “I wish I would see you again so I could give you something for Christmas.” What she didn’t know was that she had given me something that no material gift can. A sense of fulfillment that I have done something good to a complete stranger.
I felt that I didn’t fail God. I felt happiness. Not the happiness I’ve felt when I would pass difficult exams, or win contests, or see my favorite singer in concert, or find a dress that fits—not even that close. It was a different kind of happiness, the unselfish kind—the kind that, when shared with another person, doesn’t diminish, but instead grows and overflows.
I walked home with my heart filled with contentment, and my eyes wet with tears.
Vienna Maria Aurora J. Austria, 17, is a BA Linguistics student at the University of the Philippines Diliman.