14/11/2017
10 years ago, this is where it all started. Via Cordusio, Milan Italy.
I still vividly remember that cold Sunday morning. I was handling out phamplets on the streets. My attention was directed to an old Filipina walking pass by me. She looks so fragile, barely able to walk and it seems all her energy has been drawn by the ground. At that moment everything seems to have went in slow motion.
Feeling sad I offered her a cappucino and we started talking. I later found out that she has been in Milan for more than 20 years.
With joy in her eyes, she fondly shared her wonderful experience abroad. She talked about how great it was then to go home to the Philippines. With long lines of well wishers and jeeps fetching her at the NAIA airport.
How great it was to share her blessings to family, friends, relatives and even the entire barangay.
But suddenly those joyful eyes slowly turned to sadness. She shared how everything changed towards the later part of her life.
As she grew older her body can't anymore endure the 12 hours of work. Her capacity to earn became smaller and her time has to be divided not only to work but she needed time to rest to gather strength for the following day.
As her capacity to earn became smaller, so did the lines of well wishers and jeeps fetching here every time so goes back to the Philippines.
Until she mentioned to me that now she doesn't want to go back to the Philippines. Not because she doesn't like or enjoy her birthplace. But because she doesn't want to feel the same sadness she felt during her last and final visit in the Philippines where nobody even cared enough to pick her up at the airport.
This was the moment I decided to start a fight, a fight that every Filipino deserves to be free, deserves to be rich and most especially deserves to live a FRICH life.
10 years has passed but the drive to make a difference continues to grow stronger inside me. It started as a fight for overseas Filipinos in Milan, then it became the entire Europe, then Asia, then the Middle East, then America and then it became the whole world!
Now it has become a global movement, a fight to help every Filipino achieve true freedom. To have the freedom of choice, the freedom of time and the freedom to do whatever they want and make a difference in this world.
Share this post and join me in this movement. Together we will bring Filipinos and the Philippines to greater heights, to a new level of prosperity and awareness. And not only that, make the Philippines lead the world again.
Terence Rey H. Lim
FRICH Mentor
