OUR CONVERSION

The oldest in the family was Alfredo and at this time, while we were living in Mahayag, he encountered a group that held a meeting at the market place in Sicpao. Alfredo and Conchita, my oldest sister, stayed behind in Sicpao when we moved to Mahayag and Manoy Fred was attracted to the meeting because there was much singing. Manoy Fred was a very good singer and Manang Conchita also. Both of them were also very good dancers. And being teenagers they led the others in shows and entertainments, of course, the barrio kind of entertainment. Manoy Fred got attracted to the meeting and little did he know that it was about religion. For the very first time Manoy Fred encountered a religion that was very bombastic and really different from the Catholic way. Up to this time we were a professing Catholics. But shortly after Manoy Fred embraced the new religion my father and mother followed suit and I also got involved in singing and Bible verses memorizing. My whole family got converted. My father gave a portion of his land to the church and also help put up the building. From Mahayag we would walk back to Sicpao for eight hours in order to attend the new religious meeting and while in Sicpao we would stay in our old house. Mahayag was a place for my father's business and Sicpao was still the farm where my Dad would harvest corn, rice, bananas, and including mangoes. During this time that we have gotten involved in the church we now frequented coming back to Sicpao and would hold prayer meeting in our house. There were nights that our house would shake literally as all of us inside would also shake while praying. My brother Virgilio, one of the twins, stayed up in a loft very close to the roof of the house, it looked like a ceiling, and during prayer time he would shake from that part of the house and fall down to the floor. This prayer meeting was beside the services that we have to come to regularly on Sundays and Wednesdays in the church. The church which my father built was immediately filled with people as the neighbors were quickly gotten converted. But my brother Ramon was a hardened one. He did not want the new religion and was adamantly opposed to it. One Sunday, on the height of Pastor Gulfan's preaching, he staged up a stabbing scene with his friend, feigning a fight while holding real long knives. As the two screamed loudly as if to really kill each other in front of the church, my mother, seeing her son in a fight, and my dad looking at Manoy Ramon and Quilito, jumped out from their seats, with me tugging along and shaking mightily. Pastor Gulfan halted his sermon and the church scampered for safety. Manoy Ramon pursued Quilito up a hill and the whole church also followed after in order to stop the fight. Later on, we found out that it was simply a stage-up just because my brother Ramon did not want the church. Two years passed, Manoy Ramon got converted and eventually became a pastor.

While back in Sicpao I saw several miracles taking place in front of me. One notable miracle was during my mother's delivery of our youngest sister, Rosalie. As commonly done in these places of almost no civilization, women delivered babies assisted by a "hilot." A hilot is a local midwife. I was outside watching the fire burned as a container of water was being heated up to a boil, I could hear my father screaming that my mother was going to die. She was bleeding a lot while the baby was coming out, and being weak in body, she passed out. My dad became frantic and hysterical. He commanded me to run to the pastor's house and to bring him to our house in order to pray for my mother. My mom was totally gone from consciousness when Pastor Gulfan arrived. He rebuked the sickness mentioning the name of Jesus Christ and my mother came back. The baby came out fine and the next day my mother was well.

Another miracle that happened was when I accidentally speared my brother Titing with a speargun. We were in the river spearing for fish and being that I was just a young boy I was inexperienced to use a speargun. Titing was sitting on the big rock while I was googling a fish that was directly underneath that same big rock. While I was burrying my head in the water, I was unaware that my spear was pointing towards Titing's thigh. Then, it went off, piercing his thigh into the other side. I pulled the spear out of his flesh with some meat and blood came out on the end. Titing wailed so very loudly and my father had to come in order to carry him back to the house. Needless to say, I was severely punished.

That very evening, Titing's thigh became so big, it was so swollen. The next day it looked like my brother was going to die, the surrounding of where the spear hit, turned blackish, and on the wound there were yellowish mush. Pastor Gulfan was summoned to pray for my brother and before he left he gave us an assurance that God already touched my brother. That night, I could not sleep. I then opened my eyes to look around in the middle of the darkness. There I saw a light in one corner and Jesus Christ was on the cross bleeding, as if he was just crucified moments ago. I cried and cried. I did not know what to make out of it. I got scared from what I saw. But the next day, my brother Titing could already walk, and all the swollen thigh got small and turned to normal. There was never a treatment that we applied in his thigh. It was a sheer miracle how he got healed from the wound of a big spear.