Ramel Ytang Uy did not have control of his life, like most of us, from the moment he was born and walked the dusty streets to school in San Luis, a town in what was then war-torn Mindanao.
First, his name was spelled wrong at the Civil Registrar – with an “e” instead of an “i” supposed to be a portmanteau for his father, Raymundo, and his mother, Milagros.
Doc Ramel, as he is fondly called by friends and employees, rode the currents of what he calls now as an “impoverished” life, learning to help his former militiaman-father earn a living at a young age.
In between school, when he was around 12 or 13, he and his younger sibling, Remelito, sold vegetables on the street, his first “broadcasting” job so to speak though his younger brother, he said, had the better voice.
“Talong, balatong, kalabasa,” Doc Ramel recalls the first merchandising line he shouted on the streets of San Luis town where he and his brother, whom he affectionately calls Tata, would sell the fresh produce of their father.
One day, as he was walking to school, Doc Ramel wished under the searing heat that his father could give him a BMX bike, the craze of young ones in the 80s that could be likened now to owning a smartphone.
He continued to study without that bike, walking three kilometers to school and three kilometers back.
Six kilometers a day for more than 1,400 days.
It was not the fad, however, that made Doc Ramel want that bike. He just wanted to have more energy to study better at home.
That bike, however, never came.
“I graduated high school but my father never got to buy it for me,” he said.
But he did finish school, his family moved to Cebu where he took another “broadcasting” job, that of a jeepney conductor on a jeepney on the Consolacion-Cebu loop, a job, which in the Philippines comes with the extra role of being the live ad.
“Lacion, Lacion, Cebu, Cebu,” he remembers his alternate cries as he hung precariously on the stepboard, the cry depending on where the jeepney was headed.
Now, many years later, Ramel Uy is thinking of retiring at 46, hoping to travel the world and learn something new from other cultures.
Now, too, he drives to work from home 300 meters away sometimes on a BMW SUV, German made, one of the many cars that the former jeepney conductor now has in his garage.
“I asked only for a BMX but God gave me a BMW; I feel truly blessed and I feel I have to share those blessings,” Doc Ramel said on the sidelines of a tribute thrown for him by more than 70 scholars, some of whom graduated with Latin honors from their respective courses this school year.
Indeed, Doc Ramel’s life has gone far enough, as far as the distance spanning San Luis and Bacolod, the city he now calls home.
Blending a sharp business acumen and savvy marketing skills, Ramel Uy can comfortably live off his money now but that, to him, is not the meaning of life.
He now wants to give back, first by having his own news and talk radio network, the first based in Negros Island Region.
That network, named after his five sons whose first names all start with “K,” is like a love letter to broadcasting, a tribute to the medium that has led to phenomenal sales of his products under the Clinica de Alternativo and Wellness Center brand.
But with it came a scholarship, a corporate social responsibility program that had silently been going on for years.
