"Naay usa ka customer nagsulti nga maghulat daw siya pag dyes y sais ko, uyabon daw niya ko. Maniac gyud (There was one customer who told me he'll wait till I turn 16 and then he'll make me his girlfriend. He was sleazy)," Princess said, as we chomped on bags of boiled peanuts that she was selling.
She's a regular in that row of bars downtown. She goes to school from morning till afternoon, plays basketball after classes, and then walks around the bars to sell boiled peanuts until around midnight.
Talking with her I learned she's the younger sister of my two other peanut vendor suki more than 15 years ago. I met her elder sister Daisy first, who was then in third grade. I met a much older sister Iris through Daisy. Iris was already in her teens then, and she was also selling peanuts. Yet another sibling, Banban, was the suki vendor of another friend in another area downtown.
We'd bump into each other in the nightspots of those years past, and both would regularly drop by the office, which at that time was still downtown. Daisy wanted to go to college, but she got pregnant just before high school graduation.
"Okay ra man kay pakaslan man ko, ate (It's all right because the one who impregnated me promised to marry me)," I remembered Daisy telling me when her tummy wasn't starting to show yet. Also selling peanuts with her was her cousin Joan. Unlike Daisy who opted to get married right after high school, Joan finished college with a little outside help.
Long after that time, I still occasionally bumped into Daisy. She's still out there almost every night. I'm the one who has retired from the nightly binge of the younger years. The last time was three years ago, when Daisy said her eldest was already in grade school and she already has a second son. Joan, she said, has already married. The cousin wasn't as lucky in finding a job even with her degree in accountancy. She was, after all, just a regular student; a young peanut vendor who was given a break in life but had to contend with the harsh realities of being poor and not so intelligent.
In that long association with Daisy, I learned that there were 12 children in their family, but one died. Princess said they are now just 10 as another sibling died when she was 10. She is the only one going to school now, Princess said. The others have married, while others have already finished high school. Daisy, she said, already has three children. Banban too is already married with two children.
"Naa ba'y makit-ang trabaho kung high school graduate ka?" she asked. Not one of them has reached college she said, and she doesn't see herself reaching college as well. There's no money for that.
She's 12 and is in fourth grade.
Will she ever get a job? I had to be honest with her. The most likely job that awaits her as a high school graduate is as bagger in a grocery. But with so many of them out there, that will be difficult. I urged her to try out her hand in some vocational course instead. I'm not so sure about that though. It will really depend on how resolute she will be when she's older; Joan graduated from college and got nowhere.
She had a lot of other stories, about her fellow vendors, her customers, and the security guards who harass her. But all I could think of was the string of siblings who all had to earn a living selling peanuts. All of them except the one who died at 10 almost three years ago, but that was because this sibling was differently-abled. Princess described this sibling as having difficulty in walking and could not talk. One day, she just didn't wake up.
From her stories too, I gathered that her family lives in a river delta in the southern part of the city. "Natungaan 'to sa tubig (It's surrounded by waters)," was how she described their settlement area. As such, their house is not spared from the rising waters; at one time, they had to vacate because the river waters swelled, threatening to sweep away their home. They're still there though, and she seems to see nothing wrong with that. It's home.
She still doesn't have any idea what will await her after high school, as her elder sister is still selling peanuts long after graduating from high school and getting married. But her persistent questions about the possibilities she can explore showed a keen interest in finding a better life. Whether she will indeed find this, is a question that can be answered maybe another decade from now. Her sisters and her cousin didn't, and in those days a long time ago, all girls wore that hopeful look in their eyes that Princess had the other night.
