# 35 The Ugly House

When I was a little girl, I remembered one morning my mother was packing our belongings. I don’t know why, I was young to understand the whole situation then I heard my father was screaming, “hurry up! hurry up! We need to catch the train.”
At the train station I wanted to ask my mother where we’re going and why, but I was caught up with a lot of emotion. Because I knew something was wrong. I felt there will be a big change in my life, in our life. Finally I heard the train coming, and I watched my dad putting our luggage in the compartment, while my mother are taking all her children one by one inside the train. It was an eighteen hour trip from the big city of Manila to a small town of Sipocot , and from the town of Sipocot we took a bus. The bus was crowded, loaded with people (smelly people), animals like chicken, pigs, and monkeys. I can hear the pigs making noises at the back, and every time I looked behind me these different kinds of creatures stares at me as if to eat me. I can’t recognize which are the animals and which one are the human beings. At a very young age I remembered saying to myself “my gosh’, My mother is too pretty to ride in this stinky bus.
Watching the bus from the outside you will never think the bus will able to make it to our destination. The road was rough and dusty, It was a bumpy ride, but for a child it was fun. Finally we arrived to a small village, and then I saw a very ugly house.
The house was very small, ugly and scary. It was made from old salvaged wood and the roof was webbed from coconut leaves. There is no electricity, or running water, no bedroom, or a living room, but there was a four-legged piece of wood and I’m not sure if it was a table or a bed.
It was a very exhausting day for all of us. We all went to bed early, Oh’ I forgot we didn’t have any bed so we all went to floor early. And I remember all my sisters and I were very scared, we can hear the animals crying from the woods and we also realized we barely have any roof, We can see the bright stars from the skies....