orty years ago in a remote place hunkered down at the foot of the Sierra Madre Mountain Range, I met my first teacher from whom I learned to read and write. I was a Grade 1 student in the Dicamay 1 Elementary School, a distant and dead-end barrio, my birthplace, of Jones town in the province of Isabela. The Sierra Madre straddles the eastern side of Isabela and links Isabela to the province of Aurora. Isabela’s part of the mountain used to be a thickly forested area, boasting ancient tall trees, some 1 to 2 meters in diameter, until it was totally denuded by rampant logging operations during the ’70s and ’80s. The young Miss Flor Mejia was the lone teacher in our barrio. She handled Grade 1 and Grade 2 levels, the only sections that were available to our community. Her calling as a teacher, with God as her guide, I would assume, must have motivated her to
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