Fish be with Nanay Curing Villar

There are many things that can make a mother smile. For Nanay Curing Villar, a meal of delicious fish, preferably bangus, will make her happy.

Call her sentimental, but it was selling fish that enabled her to raise her nine children and send them to college. One of her favorite meals is still banana and bagoong (salted fish) with rice. “Haay, ang sarap. Ayoko ng karne, magastos ‘yanI (I don’t like meat, that’s too expensive).”

And what makes Nanay Curing Villar cry?

“I cry while praying every night before I sleep. My tears just fall every time I pray. I say, ‘Lord, please protect my son. Help him. Tulungan mo po siya, kasi mabait po siya.’ I can’t help but cry,” Nanay Curing tells me, her tears indeed beginning to fall.

Nanay Curing, 85, has been a market vendor most of her life. She is the mother of Senator Manny Villar, her assistant tindero who rose to become a successful entrepreneur and the country’s housing industry leader. And with more prayers, the man most likely to be the country’s next leader.

But a crybaby mama Nanay Curing certainly is not. As soon as her tears dry, you see a strong woman with a fortitude shaped by years of poverty and hard work. She laughs with pride as she recalls scenes from her life story. It is a sad but inspiring one.

Curita Bamba had the makings of a good tindera, even as a child. She was a valedictorian in elementary school in Orani, Bataan. She was such an arithmetic wiz that she was like a walking calculator. Her family was so poor she would collect empty tin cans and sell these to bagoong dealers. Her mother was a former housemaid of a governor in Orani.

She had just started high school when a fire razed most of Orani, forcing her family to rent a room in Tondo. She became a self-supporting student at the National University, sewing clothes at the Hollywood Shirt Factory in Ongpin. “One of my classmates was Jaime de la Rosa, brother of movie actor Rogelio de la Rosa,” she remembers.

When the war broke out, her family moved back to Bataan where she and her two sisters accompanied their father selling fish and other seafood from a fishpond to the Pritil Market. One day a young man, Manuel Villar, accosted them and wanted to confiscate all their fish. Manuel was tasked by the Japanese to get food for them. Curing urged him to save the fish instead for fellow Filipinos. He agreed and she gave him one kilo of prawns. And thus began the love story of Curing and Maning.

“I remember that my first meal after giving birth to our firstborn was puto (rice cake), the only food Maning could afford at that time. We would boil coffee in empty tin cans.”

Deliverance came after the war when Maning, a Bureau of Fisheries inspector, was granted a scholarship for higher education, leading to a job promotion. It was in Moriones, Tondo where all nine children of the couple were born.

And it was in Divisoria where Curing was able to get her own stall, number 22-45 of the fish section, finally enabling her to use all her tindera skills honed since childhood.

“My eldest son, Manny, started going with me to market at the age of six. He would help me carry and arrange the fish in our stall,” Nanay Curing recalls. “When I enrolled him in public school, Manny would prefer to skip classes and help me in the market, saying that school was boring because his teacher would make the class repeat the same lines — ‘Go to the door, run to the window’ — in English class for one week.

“There were times when I couldn’t pay my rent or my fish suppliers on time, and the market bosses or traders would scold me. It came to a point where I had to issue postdated checks. On the due dates, I would ask Manny to line up outside the bank as early as 7 a.m. to deposit funds for these checks. Once, the bank teller told Manny: ‘Ang baho naman nitong pera mo, ang lansa!’ (These paper bills stink, they smell like fish!) and Manny would quickly retort: ‘Trabaho ninyo ‘yan, gawin ninyo, kahit mabaho pa’ (It’s a job, and you must do it, no matter if the bills stink).”

“One thing I noticed was that as a child, while Manny’s brothers and sisters would go out to play, he wasn’t really fond of playing. Instead, I would catch him staring at the sky, with a ballpoint pen in his mouth, as if dreaming,” says Curing.

A dreamer and a doer Manny turned out to be. He was a working student at UP where he got his college and master’s degrees in business administration. He would wake up early in the morning to get the early hauls of fish to be sold in the market. After college, he worked as an accountant at SyCip Gorres & Velayo, only to go back to selling fish, this time with his own seafood delivery business.

Nanay Curing recalls how Manny had the ability to solve problems as they came. “Hasa talaga sa akin yan (He really learned from me). One restaurant that Manny was delivering seafood to couldn’t pay him. What he did was print out meal tickets which he urged the restaurant owners to honor. He sold these tickets to office workers.”

Then Manny became a financial analyst, where his job was to sell World Bank loans. Wanting to make it on his own again, he quit his job and later availed of the loans, which offered attractive rates.

With P10,000 in capital in 1975, Manny Villar bought two reconditioned trucks and began his own gravel-and-sand business in Las Piñas. While delivering to big real estate developers, Manny thought: Why not sell affordable house and lot packages? From the mass housing industry, Villar went on to building up-market subdivisions.

Manny attributes his business success to his Nanay Curing. “I learned from my mother what it takes to be an entrepreneur. And it means working really hard to achieve your dreams.”

Now Manny Villar is called “Mr. Sipag at Tiyaga.” He and his wife, Congresswoman Cynthia Villar, have instilled the same work ethic in their children Paolo, Mark and Camille.

Nanay Curing stresses that even while Manny and her other children have become successful entrepreneurs, things haven’t changed much for her. “Matipid pa rin ako (I am still a frugal person). And I still enjoy selling.”

Once a tindera, always a tindera. Right in front of her house in Las Piñas, she still runs a sari-sari store called Nanay Villar’s Store.

Nobody has attempted to tell Nanay Curing to just close the store, relax and take it easy.

That would make her cry.