COMPOSTELA VALLEY- One of the sons of this southern Filipino province, who recently passed the 2006 Bar Examinations, was once a “jambolero” or peddler, a newsboy and cockpit “kristo” too.
A resident of Nabunturan town, the 29-year old Rex Jasper Lopoz or simply Tata to his friends, beams with pride as he recalls the difficult struggles he had that ultimately led him to who is now - a lawyer!
In his elementary days, he learned to peddle cigarettes, sell ice drops and newspapers in bus terminals in Nabunturan and Montevista towns during weekends to augment the small money he had for schools as his teacher-parents could only pitifully spare as he has three other brothers.
In his high school and college days, he made forays in various odd jobs to earn something like becoming a cook or chef of a small eatery, making feasibility studies for a fee and becoming a kristo in town cockfights.
In cockfighting parlance, the kristo (or masyador) is a rough equivalent of a bookkeeper. He is the man in charged in calling and matching bets from cockpit gamblers using hand signals amidst the noise and shouts that envelop the cockpit before cocks go for a bloody duel.
“I’m off to cockfights with empty pocket and always I and my fellow kristos go home with money for our families,” now Atty. Lopoz muses.
Kristos earn from percentage and balato (giveaway) from winning bettors. Or they themselves bet while doing a-Kristo.
Being both a family man and a working student, Lopoz finished his law studies in a span of seven years a year and semester of which he stopped for economic reason. But he took and passed the bar exam once.
Already a married man when he started his law schooling, he sustained his family and pursued his schooling by working as a college instructor in various colleges. He had also gone working as legislative legal researcher in the city councils of Davao and Digos.
For having immersed in the rough world of the lumpen proletariat and having gone in tumble with hard economic realities while pursuing his dream of becoming a lawyer, Lopoz has only this to say: "My life in the streets made me understand the life of the common tao. That's why my success is very fulfilling not only for my family but also for the people that I've lived with."
He jokingly added that “now is the proof for all jamboleros, ice drop peddlers, newsboys, and kristos not to lose hope as anybody from you can do a possible through sheer determination”
With Lopoz five other Comvalenyos passed the 2006 bar exams, four of whom are re-takers.
Lopoz finished his law studies at Cor Jesu College Law School in Digos City. Twelve law students of the school, which is run by Sacred Heart Brothers, passed the bar exams making it as one of the best performing law schools in the country in the last bar exams.
He said he learned from Cor Jesu “the essence of compassion, conscience and competence .“
Atty. Rex is invariably helped and challenged by his two other older brothers who had gone ahead of him into becoming lawyers, Atty. Jaime “Junjun” M. Lopoz, Jr., former Ombudsman-Mindanao attorney, who passed in 1987, and Atty. Arvin Dexter M. Lopoz, No. 2 top-notch in the 2000 Bar Examinations. (Cha Monforte, Special for the Mindanao Examiner)
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