It was on my mother’s eightieth birthday, seven years after my father died, when I got to talk to my brother on the phone from Saudi Arabia. Nine of twelve children in our family were present except for three siblings who were based in the US and the Middle East. He said he’d be coming home soon for Christmas.
After a week, we received a news about my brother that he was rushed to the hospital in his place of work, then heard of him no more, a few weeks after that incident.
Family members were all worried and two of my sisters tried to communicate with his employer about his true situation. It took them more than three weeks to coordinate with the head office where he worked. News came a few days more that my brother had his first stroke while on the job, almost a month after my mother’s birthday.
We were all supposed to be excited for his homecoming, but things didn’t go well for him. He was half-paralyzed. It was before New Year of 2014, that me and my husband were asked to be the welcome party for him who will be arriving from Saudi Arabia. At last, he will be back home, but on a wheel chair. We needed to borrow a wheel chair from my mother-in-law, but thanks to the employer’s initiative to donate one for my brother.
On the day of his arrival, me and my husband proceeded to a fine dining restaurant where we reserved a dinner buffet table for six, two nuns, one is my sister, another sister, me and my husband and him.
When they arrived I did not fully recognize him because he was once a medium built healthy looking man. But I saw an old frail man, with sun burned skin and who can barely walk, held by the two nuns. I felt so saddened, about to cry but I held back my tears. Immediately, I tried to change my mood and smiled at him, welcomed him and my sisters. I showed them to our buffet table. It was although a relief for us, his family that finally he reached home even with his condition, a half paralyzed body. He was trying to walk and act normally, I knew he was trying to go back to his once normal condition. I think it’s a long way to go and so much effort needed to do on his part with enough courage and determination.
Well, this is only the first part of my story about one of my Pinoy Expat siblings, my brother, the eldest boy in our family, who came back and forth to the Middle East to work for more than seventeen years. I am proud of my brother. To be continued.
mylifewithofws 