By Menchu Aquino Sarmiento
As a young girl in San Juan, Batangas, Marites Valencia Odarbe had it all. Her father Roger and her mother Paz vowed their children would never experience poverty, as they had. ROPAZ Enterprises was into everything: trading in agricultural supplies and firearms; leasing out farm equipment, delivery trucks and heavy machinery; real estate development and money lending.
Marites was her daddy’s girl. Roger indulged her speech, voice and even modeling lessons. She won elocution contests and declaimed during ROPAZ events. She tasted teenage independence as the only one among her siblings sent to high school in Manila, at the UST, then to college at the UP Diliman. Roger unflaggingly supported her dream of becoming a lawyer despite a succession of law schools, from UP down to the so-called “others.”
Crippling migraines and inexplicable fatigue afflicted Marites throughout her college years. Her neat cursive script became illegible. These were the first mysterious symptoms of the disease that has since shaped her life. When she stood up to recite in her Ateneo law class, the earth moved. It was no earthquake but her body taken over by uncontrollable tremors. After years of consulting specialists and getting medical tests, she was finally diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s Disease, a progressively degenerative movement disorder.
Marites jokes about her various Parkinsonian personalities: the Dancing Queen (Uncontrollable Tremors), the Frozen Princess (immobile or catatonic), the Robot (jerky movements). The champion declaimer now stammered. Most debilitating of all was the ensuing deep depression that totally destroyed her dream of becoming a lawyer.
Unlike the Biblical Job who lost his health last, for Marites this tragedy was just the first in a rapid onslaught: the ROPAZ businesses fell like dominos, and her parents died within a year of one another. The saving grace in this downturn was that Marites met and married the love of her life: Jan Odarbe, also a member of the local Living Waters charismatic community. Because of Marites’ disability, Jan took on most of the household chores and physically cared for his wife and their only daughter Jeanne Marie or JM, a consistent honor student. However, he was “pa-extra extra lang” and Parkinson’s medication isn’t cheap.
When Marites was nearing 40, having spent almost half of her life as a PWD, she decided it was time to let her light shine. This was not so she could bask in the spotlight like the Marites of old, but that through her witness, the power that is greater than us all might shine through. Proving that this movement disorder would not get the better of her, Marites finally moved. She joined the UP-initiated Community Based Rehabilitation Program (CBR) and was elected chair of the San Juan Agapayan PWD Cooperative.
As the Good Book says: ask and you shall be given. Without a padrino, Marites approached San Juan Mayor Rodolfo Manalo who promptly appointed her the focal person of the Office for PWD Affairs. Despite her Civil Service eligibility and a degree in Public Administration from UP, the depression which often accompanies Parkinson’s had caused Marites to behave as if Parkinson’s Disease meant the end of a productive life.
The elocution and personality development lessons of her girlhood came into play when Marites was a co-presenter at the 2nd Asia Pacific Community Based Rehab (CBR) Congress in 2011 in Manila. Then it was on to a larger international stage and a standing ovation at the 2012 CBR World Congress in Agra, India.
From her wheelchair, Marites spoke of CBR as the means to achieve the government’s good intentions for PWDs as embodied in the Convention on the Rights of PWDs (CRPD): “CBR and CRPD cannot be defined by mere words but by moments which transform. The real measure of how effective they are, is when those like me, who once saw themselves as PWDs, see themselves as PODs or persons of destiny.”
It was a struggle with a miracle at every turn, starting with funding for the conference registration; being allowed to register after the deadline; getting the visa a day before the flight then being left behind by the plane… “But it was worth it as now I can face the world and shout it out, that I am no longer a PWD, but a POD.”
In the prime of her life, it seemed as though Marites had lost everything. But God wasn’t done with her. At every stage of her long hard journey from being the girl with everything to a PWD and now to a POD, Marites learned above all, to trust His will. That is the title of the book she has just published through the Komiks Guild of the Philippines. For as Marites declares in her earthy Batangueno Tagalog: “Kapag sa iyo nauukol, talagang bubukol.”
