Graduate also went to School of Hard Knocks in Lucena City

Helping out

Being the eldest boy in the family, Frias realized early enough that he needed to help out, although what got him started was a more selfish reason. He wanted a cell phone, something that his classmates and friends had because their parents could afford it. So he started peddling pan de sal before breakfast and pan de coco in the afternoon. He was just in sixth grade. Each piece of bread cost him P4 and he sold at P5. He made P40 most days, as much as P120 on better days.

Frias didn’t get to buy the cell phone because he ended up giving his earnings to his mother to make ends meet.

A year later, he was brave enough to try pushing the trolley. The railway, as it turned out, made for a good classroom. He was picking up math, problem-solving and social skills in the real world, not to mention he was getting a free workout.

One day, exhausted from peddling bread using the trolley, he accidentally hit a three-year-old child, who had no injuries but ended up crying. “I will never forget the look on the father’s face,” Frias said. “That was really scary. He was going to hit me. I was lucky the child’s mother was able to stop him.” He added that he is friends with the man now.

Backbreaking work

The flip side of that experience was the time his friends from QNHS came by for a trolley ride with him. Now imagine a group of high school boys atop an open cart rolling down a track where, any minute now, a train or another trolley could be coming. Imagine the boys imagining themselves riding in a convertible with its top down, the wind in their faces, cracking jokes all around. “We had a lot of fun,” said Frias.

But imagine, too, how exhausting it is to push a trolley, how backbreaking it is for a boy in his teens to be moving the cart on and off the rails, how sore his legs and arms must be at night. He said he was thankful he had very supportive teachers at QNHS. Sometimes, he nodded off in class, he said, but no teacher had ever embarrassed him about it.

All his teachers knew he was working the railway and understood the exhaustion. One teacher, Carlo Pacinor, went to the tracks just to see for himself and soon realized that no visit with Marlo Frias would be complete without a trolley ride.

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