FDIP Toastmaster Club -- Member's Corner -- Featured Speech of the Week

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Featured Speech of the Week
This site area is created to give special publicity to our member who was voted as the Speaker of the Day. It is published here to highlight the key strong points of the speech in which the speaker was able to meet speech's objectives.

My Wonder Years
Milet Marquez
Date presented: January 18, 2002

Two things have always been dear to me: my childhood days and my school days, and it will always give me pleasure to recall school when I was still a child. The most precious of all my memories is when I spent my kindergarten year in Iran back in 1977.

I was then 6 years old and my mom was working as a government contract doctor for the Republic of Iran. My dad and I went to visit her one summer, and what was planned to be a vacation turned into over a year of stay and schooling.

Although my mother would tutor me on English & Filipino (Tagalog, for that matter), and numbers, in the first few months of our stay, most of my first learning I got from the local school.

I had experienced being a kindergarten kid absorbing a language and culture totally different from what I knew. I had a different ABC. My writing on paper was from R to L on the page, and the riddles and rhymes my parents would hear from me were all in FARSI, the country's native language.

Not only was school different. The town and the province my mother was assigned at were by the countryside. The place was called Neirez, in the province of Farz. As Iran's landscape is mostly mountain and desert. The lands that surrounded us were almost barren. One will only find almond trees and unusual thorn grasses along the highways and in the backyards. Flowers are plenty though where palaces and bigger houses have gardens.

The games and playmates I had then were really 'country'. My first thought when I saw how the people looked, was my mental images of typical people in the bible stories. This was because my mom had a picture of Jesus Christ (as a child) with Mary. And I thought all the ladies looked like Mary and most of the kids looked like Jesus. Chasing flocks of sheep, riding a donkey, drinking from natural spring, and riding an old bicycle with good looking brown eyed playmates, were only a few of the happy memories I can never forget. I also remember when we would go up the hills with one of the 'uncles', pick up almonds, and crush the nuts with stone.

I just came to realize now, that girls are expected to stay home even as a kid, that no wonder I had mostly male playmates and mostly knew about boys' games and tricks.

When I would hang around my parents and some of their co-workers, I had the chance to experience Iran's local weddings and feasts. I got to smell, taste, and see how their native foods were. The sweet cookies and the flavored and colored dishes, I had come to like. Even the dances I would do and the songs I would hum were Iranian. In fact my dad was so proud of how fast I could learn the language, a lot faster than he could, he bought me a music tape of Iranian songs for me to sing along with. And before we came back to the Philippines, my mom bought me a present to bring home, a complete costume of Iranian clothing they wore at that time.

There are times in recent years as a grown up, that I would look back and remember those wonderful times.

Today, when I see an Iranian in the Philippines, I smile, reminiscing about my childhood in Iran; and how I had a very fascinating experience of its culture.

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