When our network Webmaster Errol asked me via email if I would like to be Guevarian of the month, I initially harbored mixed feelings about the idea. Why would anyone be interested in reading my profile?

But then I thought, why not? Maybe the younger Guevarians would want to know something about our generation. The mid 50's. We lived it. We were there.

Life was a lot simpler during the 50's and totally different from what we know today. There were no TV (at least, not yet in the Philippines during those times), no cell phone, no CD nor DVD, no computers, nothing of these trappings of modern life.

Walking to school with the rain drenching our feet during the many rainy school days was one of my joys. So was running in the nearby rice fields at the back of the Aglipayan Church in my hometown of Sta. Cruz, Laguna.

A peso allowance could buy all the banana Q's and soft drinks to my heart's content. I wore the green and white school uniform, required for the first time during our senior year, with an almost arrogant pride.

It was a time when lifetime friendships were made, a time when unrequited love was spoken.

Per my parents wishes, I went to law school and passed the bar examinations the same year that I graduated. I took graduate courses in public administration at UP Padre Faura while holding various government jobs as legal assistant to the Quezon City Fiscal, as legal officer for the Civil Service Commission, and as election registrar for the Commission on Elections. My older sister then cautioned me about rolling stones not gathering any moss, but I didn't care. I was young and carefree and totally enjoying my single life.

I had always wanted to join the Philippine Foreign Service because I believed that it would serve as my passport to all the exotic places in the world that I only read about in books and watched in the movies.

I dreamed of being the "rich aunt" who did not take the uncharted plunge to matrimony but raised and pampered a favorite niece or nephew. It was not meant to be - I did as much of the traveling as I wanted to do, but not through the route I imagined.

In 1966, I married a US Navy petty officer, Noel Dela Rosa, a classmate who transferred to PGMHS in his junior year. Classmates knew him as "Noe Rosa", but he used his father's legal family name of "Dela Rosa" when he enlisted with the Navy. I learned later that his father had to change his monicker during the Japanese occupation for security reasons.

This marriage that I would consider the supreme adventure took me initially to the doors of the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland where Noel was to report right after we were married. Imagine being introduced for the first time to falling snow, to the grandeur of the leaves in autumn, to Thanksgiving dinner with all its trimmings, to the American way of life. The TV news showed Martin Luther King delivering his numerous speeches for civil rights, the Kent State shooting where innocent students fell to their deaths, the '68 assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson burgeoned by the unpopular Vietnam War.

It was during these tumultous times that my two older children, Noelle and Christian, were born in Annapolis. En route to our next duty station in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, I received a wire that my mother, Aurelia Abanto Porciuncula, died in Sta. Cruz. With a toddler and a baby in tow, I undertook the long, lonely plane ride home to the Philippines. The year was 1969.

Growing up in the 70's in Honolulu with its palm trees swaying in the winds and its beaches beckoning picnic-goers, swimmers and sunbathers alike, my children learned a more relaxed, easy-going attitude about life.

Trips to the Philippines happened every 2-3 years because of Hawaii's proximity to the homeland. There, the children experienced their parents' roots, first hand.  Noelle loved eating the tropical fruits while Chris wondered why so many kids like him were selling anything and everything.

After more than eight years of island living, and the birth of our third child, Kristina in 1977, Noel was transferred to NAS Fallon in northern Nevada on his last tour of duty before navy retirement. Having come from the land of aloha right smack into the middle of the desert in Nevada, my son would come home from school saying, "Mommy, I don't like it here. When are we going back home to Hawaii?" What could a mother say?

We lived in Fallon, a city 63 miles east of Reno, and now home to Top Gun, even after Noel retired from the Navy in 1981. I worked nights as a "21" dealer at the Nugget so that I could stay with the baby during the day. Once she started school, I took the state exams for library assistant and got hired at the University of Nevada Reno.

Noel found employment with the federal civil service but was later relocated to San Diego in 1987 when the civilian services at the NAS Fallon became privatized.

In 1988, I found a job at the university library of the University of California San Diego where I work to this day. Then it was time for another sentimental trip to the Philippines when my father, Segundo G. Porciuncula, passed away the following year.

The children? Our pride and joy. Noelle is a licensed attorney for the State of California who, just like her Mom thirty years ago, passed the bar examinations the year she graduated from law school in 1992. She is married to a practicing attorney and they are expecting their first child in a couple of months.

Christian, a lieutenant with the US Navy and a mechanical engineer, recently earned his MBA degree. His wife, Gemma, works for Lucent Technologies.

Kristina graduated cum laude from UCLA last June with a degree in Biochemistry. She hopes to apply to medical school after her MCAT examinations in April.

And what of my dream to explore the far-flung, exotic places of the world? Somehow, God made it possible for me to realize this dream through marriage to Noel. What they say about joining the navy and seeing the world also applies to the navy wife and the navy kids as they too, get to see the world. And it comes with perks.

Living in Maryland afforded me to get to know the DC area and much of the Eastern seaboard; living in Hawaii is something close to living in paradise on earth; in Nevada, I tasted a different slice of life; and what more can anyone ask of San Diego, reputed to be America's finest city?

In 1992, I joined a pilgrimage to Italy, France and Portugal; in 1997, I went on an exciting trip to Mexico City and its surrounding areas, and also to Orlando, Florida with all that it offers - Disney World, Epcot Center, Kennedy Space Center.

We have traveled across the country by car and made many stops along the way. I thank God for His many blessings, and for making my dream a reality.

Noel & Nimfa

The dela Rosa Family