Sugar
“I started to pretend going to school at the age of 3. When our eldest sister would prepare to go to school, my yaya would also bathe me and bring me scrap wood to serve as my notebooks. Then I would walk to the gate with my sister. There’s a mango tree beside it and I would sit there, and pretend to be in a classroom. I would wait for my sister to come home from school and when she’s back, we walk together to our doorstep and I would also say to my yaya that I’m back from school,” Sugar happily recalls of her childhood.
“My parents thought I would grow up a child genius. The next school year, they enrolled me in nursery. Unfortunately, I was the slowest learner among my classmates and I didn’t want to go to school anymore.”
Despite wading through her formative years with tutors, she loved her childhood as she shared a strong bond with her sisters. She is the middle child, but never felt the middle child syndrome as she did everything with her sisters.
“I always had make up classes and ended my days with my tutor,” she shares. “And I cry when I study because I see my sisters playing. Later on, my mother sent me tutorials with my sisters and told them to wait for me before they start playing. My sisters patiently waited out and when I was done, I saw the smiles on their face affirming that I did a great job so then we could play.”
She also recalls that their youngest sister, Candy, learned to read before her. As a dutiful older sister, she would pretend to read story books to Candy. But in truth, she would just improvise the stories based on the pictures she sees. She remembers there were times when Candy would just stare at her. “Maybe she was wondering why my stories were different. I didn’t know she could already read the text,” she laughs.
The support she had from her sisters helped Sugar firm up her dreams. As a child, she had simple ambitions. One time she wanted to become a pedicab driver simply because she liked riding on a pedicab. Another time she wanted to be the collector of jeepney fares because they always hold a lot of money and she herself liked having a lot of money so she could buy junk food.