Gem on Broken Wires

The busy highway that connects the San Jose Del Monte and Caloocan City is full of different enterprises on both side of its four-lane road. So, it is no surprise to see merchants and workers scrambling under the blazing rays of sun with same goal on their minds – to earn. But for what? What are the reasons that kept them going? Well, this is the question that makes Filipino workers different from each other.

One of the repair shops that you can find on Quirino Highway is the fourteen-year old Electric Fan & Washing Machine repair shop of Marlyn Gatan. Aside from owning the business, she’s also the one who repairs the broken appliances. Indeed, she is the boss of her own.

And when asked the reason why she chose this line of work, Ate Marlyn smiled as she remembers her reasons. One, her youth and second, her daughter.

THE GEM OF HER YOUTH

On a hot afternoon of May, I saw ate Marlyn, a forty-year-old repairwoman, changing the shaft and bushing of a broken electric fan on her table. While her one-year-old dog is sleeping at her feet. This has been the routine of her life for several years now since she opened her electric repair shop on 2008.

According to ate Marlyn, her familiarity with wires and tools for fixing malfunctioning fans had started when she was still a child. Her father was a former rewinder to a well-known electronics company. But the branch where her father had worked for was shut down. So, her parents decided to try on having their own rewinding business on the corners of a four walled rented space at the ‘palengke’

Later on, they were able to rent a space on Cubao, Quezon City when their rewinding shop started to flourish. And little did the young Marlyn know that her fate would be intertwined by the same tools inside that shop.

Ate Marlyn beamed with nostalgia when she started to talk about how she had spent her youth guarding her parents shop in Cubao, most especially on weekends.

“I am always at our shop in Cubao. Most especially every Saturday and Sunday since both of my parents used to go to church on weekends,” she stated.

Yet, she admitted that the familiarity and awareness of tools, shop, and work weren’t sufficient enough to expect that the adult version of her will go down the same path as her parents since she tried to make her destiny abroad.

“Even if I’m always at the shop in Cubao, I never imagined that I would enter this line of work as well – repairing broken electric fans because I tried to work abroad. But when I came home from my first two years in Kuwait, my father persuaded me to just open a business here in the country,” Ate Marlyn explained.

So, like everyone who stumbled and gambled along the Quirino Highway with only one thing in mind – to build a business, this is where Ate Marlyn's fourteen-year-old repair shop business began. And from all of the days she spent at his father's shop in Cubao, all it took was six words: “Tay, teach me to fix one.”

And with hands shaking, Ate Marlyn fixed her first electric fan.

“I remember the first time I repaired a fan; the customer was really staring at me. Maybe he’s skeptical because I'm a woman and you rarely see a woman fixing a broken appliance. But I managed to finish it and that's where it started,” the smiling repairwoman confessed.

Until weeks, months, and years later, her one by one work started to double, her ‘piyesa’ multiplied, and the electric fan being repaired on the table became washing machine or sometimes a dryer.

All of these, because she learned to love the work that kept her youth busy. The line of work that now supports their financial needs.

HER TRUE GEM

For fourteen years, Ate Marlyn's Electric fan & Washing Machine Spare Parts shop has been the lifeblood of her and her only child. The expenditures for tuition, allowance, rent, and day-to-day expenses comes from her shop’s income.

Being a single mother, shouldering the expenses of raising a child all by herself was not easy. But Ate Marlyn proved that there’s nothing more in this world than the dedication of a woman and the determination of a mother who wants to give her child a good future.

“All of this is for her (my child) and now that she’s currently on 2nd year college, I really told her that ‘Nak, you’ll graduate in few more years. We can do this.’ Because the moment she finally gets her degree, somehow, I would be satisfied that I have provided her a gift that won’t be stolen from her,” she hopefully stated.

WHAT ARE YOURS?

Two more years and the dream of Ate Marlyn for her daughter will finally come true.

Because as a single mother, each faulty wire she’s fixing and every screw she’s tightening is for her child. And as a woman, it is for her daughter just as it was for herself because she loves what she does for a living. The thousands of fixed and working electric fan, washing machine, and dryer are a proof of that.

Undoubtedly, Ate Marlyn admitted that there are moments where she felt tired. It’s inevitable as she claimed. But what assures her the most are these gems – her reasons, purpose.

These are the two gems that kept Ate Marlyn Gatan going and motivated. These are the reasons she has kept her fourteen-year business running.

So, what are yours? For whom do you wake up?