More than twenty years ago, an old woman looked into my face and said, "I see a house in your future."
Yeah right. I was pregnant then with my daughter, and taking my one-year old son for a walk, a grad school drop-out, and living with my parents, waiting for the monthly remittance of my husband who was working in Angola. Sure, we will have a house some day, and live the fairy tale life from the blessings of Alex being an OFW.
Two years later, another sage predicted, "You will have a house". I was just asked to leave a job I first coveted then dreaded, and was pregnant again with my youngest, and this bit of prediction was a bit of good news as I got ready to embrace domesticity and maybe finish my on-and-off graduate school.
More than twenty years later, I still live with my parents with no house to call my own, but the predictions proved true.
I may not have a house, but I have a career in housing.
I never realized my obsession with housing until i realized that I have been writing, researching, thinking, drawing about Housing, squatters, poverty, development. My term papers in college and grad school all had themes of addressing homelessness. My one of my first jobs was with an NGO on housing, as a marketing assistant which I ditched because I was pregnant, and because I did not want to be in sales.
My specialty in NEDA as an analyst was Housing. My real job in DSWD was handling a property occupied by more than 10 thousand informal settler families. Now I am marking 14 years in the Housing and Uban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC), still obsessed with housing.
