My early retirement from the airline industry

Author: Gerardo Vergara

My decision to walk out of a regular employment was sort of an awakening that I did not belong there because I am a free thinker who loves doing and learning about anything that interested me on my own.

It was my aversion to drinking synthetic medicines that made me self-study reflexology and natural medicines which I had been teaching to rural folks anywhere I go. I am a nature lover/photographer so I always hiked in mountains  that brought me into contact with indigenous tribes in the rice terraces of northern Philippines. A man paralyzed by stroke was able to walk a month after I met him when his family followed my instructions how to administer massage to the patient. That man later called me his brother. I became known in the village after a native priest’s lumbar pains disappeared with the massage. This is people empowerment at its most basic.

The daughter of the village chief told me that her salary as a teacher went only to maintenance medicines for her hypertension. I asked her what else ailed her and she answered that she had urinary tract infection. I advised her to make a tea from avocado leaves for her UTI. She was so excited to report to me a year later that her blood pressure reverted to normal when the infection completely healed in six months of drinking the herbal preparation.

An old lady herbalist told me of the source of the medicine for diabetes and complications which I painstakingly searched for in those mountains. I found the trees and brought the leaves, which I dried and ground and sealed in tea bags. A diabetic friend whom the doctor gave up on rose from his deathbed after drinking the herbal tea for two weeks. He saw clearly again and regained body strength. The festering wound on his right foot was totally cured. He added that he drank nothing but the tea since there was no money to buy insulin.

The same happened to a lady in 2011 who surprised the priest when she went to church two months after he had administered her last rites, thinking she was dying. I told other diabetics what the leaves can do. Those who believed were so thankful for a safe treatment without spending so much money and enduring the daily ordeal of drinking so many prescription medicines on schedule and feeling no healing effects.

I called the methodology easy on the body and easy on the pocket. I simply give it away since then to those who were left into grinding poverty by this chronic disease. It was while walking on, mindful of the hardships of the people I met along the way on this journey that I came to realize that I was right on walking out of an existence that just did not bring endless joy and fulfillment to my life.