Coming home: A father's love, a son's gratitude

Sunday, January 15, 2012

FOR MOST balikbayans, coming back to the Philippines, to Cebu, is to be home again, to relive the joys, the struggles, the triumphs in the places they left behind and savor the warmth of being with family and friends.

For Dr. Jose “Bebe” Barba, it is all that and this time around, even more, because he has come home to remember and honor in a special way his late dad, Marcelo “Liloy” Barba, mayor of Toledo City from 1955 to1978, on his dad’s 100th birthday today.

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His dad had married three times, and Bebe was one of two children born to the second wife, Anunciacion, who died when he was barely three years old. His father then wanted him and his younger brother brought up in an orphanage, but his mother’s family would not hear of it and so he was taken care of by his mother’s youngest sister, Lily, with whom his father eventually fell in love and married. It is Lily, who nurtured and raised him, whom he considered his mother.

His father, Bebe recalls, was very forgiving and accommodating while he himself was not. Where his parents would accept former political enemies, he would not and was vocal about it to the point that when he was a medical intern at the Velez College of Medicine, he needed two bodyguards.

He graduated in 1972, the infamous year that then president Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law. Unknown to his parents, he flew to Manila and joined demonstrations, where he was “gassed, hosed and almost arrested.” So his father was “more than glad” to see him leave the country in 1974.

The opportunity came when urologist Dr. Renato Espinosa was president of the Philippine Medical Association and hosted a medical convention in Cebu. One of the speakers was an American surgeon who wanted to sponsor a young doctor for further training in the United States. Bebe was lucky to be it, and luckier in that he would be in the area where he wanted to be: New Jersey/New York. This was where he wanted to pursue a specialization which was not found in Cebu at the time of his medical schooling: oncology.

In the early days of their stay in the US, all his mail home would come opened or torn, if they reached his parents at all. He happened to be living in the same apartment building as the self-exiled Raul Manglapus and for all Bebe knew, he was also in the Marcos blacklist. But he was able to come home.

When his parents were alive (his father died in office in 1978), he came to Cebu three or four times a year. At his first homecoming, his parents were appalled at the sight of him being skin and bones because he and his wife, his former classmate and fellow doctor, Fidelis Alcazaren, did not know how to cook and were too busy as interns to go out and look for something “decent” to eat. So Lily, a home economics graduate, joined them for three months to teach them how to cook.

Today, Dr. Barba is one of the top oncologists in the New York/New Jersey Area. He first started at the St. Barnabas Medical Center, then went on to Mount Sinai Medical Center. He was in private practice in New York for 15 years and served as medical director of radiation oncology at the Metcalf Institute of Radiation Oncology at the Hospital Center at Orange.

He is now medical director of Virginia Harkness Sawville Department of Radiation Oncology at Mountainside Hospital. For the years 2010 and 2011, he was chosen as one of New Jersey’s top doctors by New Jersey Monthly. According to him, the American doctor nationwide has an average of 8.5 malpractice suits, but he has none.

Despite all that success abroad, Bebe still comes home, not as frequently as when his father was alive, but at least once a year because here, he says, all his headaches disappear when he steps off the plane, sees family and friends, and eats his favorite foods like caldereta (beef or goat stew), lumpia (spring rolls), (fresh) native cheese and all the other Cebu delicacies not available in New Jersey.

This time around, because of the 100th birth anniversary of his dad, his homecoming has been special and full of love and gratitude for a father loved not only by him but also by the people of Toledo.