Living far from home during college was the first real independence I experienced. It also brought with it a lot of homesickness and much looking forward to the school break.

As I say, I always looked forward to going home. After all, it was an excellent opportunity to get away from the confines of the classroom and feel once more the scorching heat of the sun in the lowlands. You see, I went to school in a university located at the highest city in the Philippines and the climate there is cooler than the rest of the country. But those school breaks weren't all easy days for us in the family – my brother, my sister and myself.

There was so much work to do.

For one, we were expected to pitch in tending our small vineyard, a business venture my mother went into to augment our family income after my father passed away. Early mornings were spent under the trellises, manually taking out weeds that grew around the main vine. Pre-harvest work meant pruning away excess leaves with a pair of small garden scissors. This, we were taught, would increase the number of flowers and improve quality of the berries. Irrigating the vines meant hauling big water hoses, training them to bring water to the canals that surrounded the main vines. A few weeks more and tiny clusters of green grapes would begin to appear, each berry inching its way out of the bunch. This required more thinning work, taking out "late bloomers" from the growing bunch to give room for more growth for the already swollen berries. We were especially careful to hide our mistakes – good berries accidentally punctured by the small garden scissors as we sought to cut away smaller berries from inside the bunch.

My mother gave us stern looks when she caught us puncturing the berries, so it always helped to have a pocket in our shirts where we could hide the ruptured berries and surreptitiously dispose of them later.

Although the vineyard was pleasantly breezy, owing to the shade provided by the leaves well spread throughout by tendrils that curled on the wires, it also meant a very stiff neck when we were done pruning.

Harvest time was even more work. Then, we went to the vineyard, basket in one hand, a pair of garden scissors in the other. And all morning we snipped away bunches of half-ripe berries from the vines, gathering them in our baskets, carefully putting them together. When we were done, there were so many baskets full of green grapes. We sat back and stared at them blankly, exhausted from the hard work, grateful that the difficult task was finally over.

Because we didn't have a proper storage area, there were baskets of grapes all over the house, waiting until we could sell them wholesale.

Apart from the vineyard work, my mother also bred pigs. We didn't have a full-time farmhand so we had to do our share of work in that department too.

Naturally, a sow couldn't choose an appropriate time to deliver her piglets. Sometimes, we'd stay up almost all night just keeping watch. When we were lucky, a sow would have her piglets during the day. My siblings and I then took our places in the pen. My sister would stand by and watch out for piglets and catch them when they emerged. She then passed each one on to me and I wiped the squirming piglet clean, careful not to let it wriggle out of my hands. Then I passed it on to my brother (about 10 or 11 years old then) who carefully cut the umbilical cord, tied it with a short length of string, dipped the remaining end in alcohol and then trimmed the young animal’s small sharp teeth with nail clippers, so that it wouldn’t bite its mother when suckling.

The intervals between individual births were sometimes long and we were forced to stay in the pen almost all day, waiting for all the piglets to arrive. When it was all over, we had fun watching the little creatures hungrily nursing at their mother's belly. It was a really delightful picture – one I still recall fondly.

All this work meant we couldn't spend as much time with friends as we would like. And I'm sure we missed out on a lot of social experiences. There were times when I resented my mother for putting us to all that work. But, looking back, I realize now that we gained so much more. These days, when my siblings and I reminisce about those hard-working times, I realize not many people my age can speak of such experiences – of tending vineyards and helping a sow deliver piglets. I now feel privileged for being given the chance to do all that – an opportunity to learn the value of hard work, of team work, of getting a difficult job done, and that uplifting sense of accomplishment after a hard day's work at such an early age.

- Lani Estepa   
San Juan, Ilocos Sur, Philipppines.