At one moment of the interview, I myself felt embarassed for asking the boy something so very touchy, that he was almost in tears. From his early childhood he had lived with his mother, after his father divorced his mother and began to live with his elder brother. He had never met his brother nor his father, until one day in the school library he happened to meet his brother, but did not know that he was his own elder brother. After putting together what he had heard from his mother, he knew that he was his own brother, now living with his father. He had the guts to tell his brother that they were related by blood.
But what he shared after this piece of information was chilling for me. His elder brother had invited him to the house where the former lived with his father. When his father asked his elder brother, who he was, it seems his elder brother told him that he was his friend. Even now, his father does not know anything about him. He lost his mother about ten years ago, and had been living at the mercy of some priests who had adopted him, and brought him up. I felt very sad for the man, whose eyes watered as he narrated bits and pieces of his life story. Even my seeming innocent questions looked very strange to him, and he struggled to answer me.
He is a fine young man, who had a lots of will power to fight against all odds to go ahead with life; he said he had taken special interest in psychology, not so much to help others, but to know about his own background, the psychological limitations he had grown with and how he could find some sort of remedy for them. This is something beautiful in him – the strong determination with which he pursued his studies and completed his undergraduation with first class, and thought of something greater for humanity, a life of commitment and dedication to the service of the wider society. I know he has many other riddles to unravel as he moves forward in life.
If I were in his situation, I wonder if I would have reached as much as he had done; embittered with life, many people attempt to find short cuts to remedy the agonizing situations; it is easy to give up hope in these situations, and luckily there had been some good-hearted priests who had helped him to recover from the loss of his only hope, his mother, who died of cancer at a time when he needed her the most. His lift support had been removed, and he would have felt that he was a lone boat in the midst of the endless sea, unable to find a way. Thank God, now he seems to be aware of where he wants to go, and how he wants to organize his life.
If there is one reason why many of the youth these days are disoriented early in life, it is because they have not seen the hardships of life, and they do not know what it means to find their own way. The families these days do not want the children to get into the waters, because they are afraid that their children might get drowned, and as a result most of them never learn swimming, and when they have to get into waters, it is too late for them to learn swimming, and that is when the fatal accidents might take place. I am happy that this young man has learned swimming through the hard way, and now he is prepared to teach other young men how to swim. And he knows he would be able to teach them better than others, because he knows the nittygritties of this new art.
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