Gimo Tenyente

Aswang of Iloilo

I am Clara, and I want to share my story with you. It started when I was a student at West Visayas State College in Iloilo, Philippines, where I majored in Education.

In my third year, I started to feel anxious that I was failing and that the stress was building up by the day. My mind drifted to quitting and returning home to be with my parents. But I knew if I walked out of college, I would let them down… They had worked hard all their lives to afford to send me to school, toiling in the sugar cane fields and rice paddies so they could save money… They wanted a better life for me than what they had, and I knew I would be a bad daughter if I quit now.

Just as my depression was ready to swallow me whole, I met Maria Gimo… Maria had transferred from a small village near Ilo-Ilo to our school, and the first day she walked into our class, I gravitated toward her. She had a magnetic personality, standing at 154cms; she had long dark brown hair that hung down to the middle of her back, and her eyes were so bright and full of life that it seemed like they sparkled when she spoke. Maria had a lighter skin tone than I had, which made me think her family was well off and she didn’t have to toil in the fields.

Ever since the first day we met, I knew we would be the closest friends, and I would not feel alone anymore. We would…