The Long Road That Led Me Away-and Back

By: Leon Magpusao

I was born and raised in Barangay Unat, Ibajay, in a home shaped not by wealth, but by work.

My parents were farmers. The land was our life – our calendar, our teacher, our measure of survival. I was the youngest of seven, three boys and four girls, and even as a child, I already understood what it meant to take part in the daily grind. I remember as a young child of seven walking along narrow paths with my mother and elder sister, carrying food to the fields where my father and brothers labored beneath the sun. At eleven, I learned how to use the plow in tilling the land. On weekends and during school breaks, I tend to our two carabaos to feed in the meadows. There was no question of whether one helped. It was simply what life required.

And yet, somewhere within that simple life, a path began to open – one that no one in our village quite expected.

At seventeen, fresh from high school, I left home with two of my sisters for Manila. It was not an easy leaving. It was not a leaving of desire, but of necessity and hope. With their help, I entered Mapúa Institute of Technology, the premier engineering school in the country. In April 1975, I graduated with a degree in Civil Engineering.

For a farmer’s son from Barangay Unat, that moment was not mine alone. It belonged to my parents, to my siblings, to the soil that raised me. No one in our village had imagined such a thing, and perhaps, neither had I, until it happened.

But education is only the beginning of another journey.

That same year, even before my board results were released, I found work with a construction company in Manila. Two years later, I joined the country’s largest construction and development corporation working on the expansion of the Manila airport. By 1979, I was part of an American firm involved in the nuclear power plant project in Bataan.

Life moved quickly after that.

I married in 1981. We built our family in Bataan, anchoring ourselves as best we could in the midst of a life that was always in motion. But in 1986, the nuclear plant was mothballed, and with it came uncertainty. Work – the very thing that had lifted me from the fields of Ibajay – once again demanded that I move.

Just three days before the end of that year, I left for Saudi Arabia, leaving behind a wife and two children.

That departure would shape the next chapters of my life.

I did not leave Ibajay because I wanted to forget it. I left because responsibility has its own geography. It takes you where you are needed, not always where you wish to remain. My work abroad, and later my return again in 2002 for another fifteen years, was never about distance; it was about provision. It was about making sure that my family would have more than what I once had, that my children – all four of them – would not have to choose between staying and becoming.

In between those years, there were brief returns, but in June 1994, I decided to come back – moments that I taught in my high school alma mater and served as its registrar – to stand again on familiar ground not as the boy who left, but as someone who had, in some way, come back fulfilled. But those moments were temporary and the most trying. Overseas work called again, and I followed.

And so, the years passed.

I built a two-storey house in Barangay Unat in 1995, beside the homes of my sisters, within the land my mother once held together for us. It was meant to be my return, a promise to myself that one day, I would come home not just to visit, but to stay.

But life, as it often does, rearranged that promise.

When I finally retired in 2017, my family had already grown roots elsewhere. We have a home in Las Piñas, where my children had built their own lives, where my granddaughter now fills our days with a different kind of purpose.

And so, I remained.

Not because Ibajay ceased to be my home, but because another home had claimed my presence.

This is the quiet truth I now carry: I did not stray from Ibajay out of neglect or forgetfulness. I was led away by the very things it taught me – hard work, responsibility, sacrifice, and the will to provide something more for those who come after me.

Now, at seventy-four, I find myself returning – not fully, but meaningfully.

In a few days, I will go home again to Barangay Unat – to visit our home there, bond with siblings, and reestablish kinship with relatives and the people in the community. This time, I will not go alone. I will bring my six-year-old granddaughter with me, fulfilling a promise I made – to show her where part of her story had began.

Perhaps I will not walk as far as I once could. Perhaps I will not stay as long as I once intended. But I will be there.

And maybe that is enough.

Because in the end, home is not only the place we return to; it is the place that never truly let us go.