The Roses She Grows

Building companies in the Philippines means putting yourself out there, researching strangers, hoping someone answers. One day a post about mentorship crossed my feed. I commented. Within the hour, a message arrived. What I found on the other end was a woman who had been door-knocking her way across the country, city by city, school by school, doing at the grassroots exactly what I was trying to build from the top.

By Michael Siervo

Building companies in the Philippines can be humbling. You arrive without contacts, constantly researching, putting yourself out there and hoping someone reaches back.

One day, scrolling my feed, a post about mentorship came up. Mentorship is something I care about deeply and have been on the receiving end of my whole career. I was surprised to see it being championed here with such urgency. I dug into it and found an entire movement building mentorship programs from the ground up. I left a comment. Within the hour, a private message arrived asking to connect.

The first time I spoke with Ethel Morales, I knew I was talking to someone resilient. She had enormous dreams about helping people become the best versions of themselves through courses and mentorship. When I asked how she was actually doing it, the answer stopped me. She travels to different cities. She knocks on doors. She has connected with school after school and spoken to hundreds of young people face to face. While I was building toward the same goal at an institutional level, she was down among the people, doing it one room at a time. Our visions were the same. Our altitudes were different.

Over many hours across many calls, she told me about the view from the mountains where she grew up, and about her family, who grew roses. Somewhere in there I understood exactly what she is doing now. She is still growing roses. She just changed what she plants.

Her mornings did not start with an alarm clock. They started with birds, cool mountain air, and first light.

She grew up in the mountains of Cebu with her grandparents, who cultivated roses on the family farm. Before school could be considered, there was work: she, her younger brother, and her cousin watered the roses before sunrise, because that was simply how life was. Only when the chores were done did she begin the six-kilometer walk to school.

She carried almost nothing. One notebook, and a pen that had to last the entire school year. Lunch was rice wrapped in banana leaves, eaten under a mango tree while they traded stories. "Looking back now, those are some of the happiest lunches I can remember." There was no electricity. She studied while the sun lasted, then by candlelight or a kerosene lamp. The farm gave them nearly everything: chickens, pigs, goats, vegetables, fruit. Money was rarely necessary. Jollibee happened once a year and felt like a festival.

School was where she found herself. She loved learning, earned honors consistently, and understood instinctively that education could open doors beyond the mountains. There was a tell, though nobody noticed it. Whenever her cousins came over, she gathered them and played teacher. "I didn't know it then, but I genuinely enjoyed helping people learn. Maybe the teacher in me was already there long before I ever realized it."

As an adult she understood she had been asking the wrong question about wealth. "I woke up every morning to fresh mountain air, birds singing, breathtaking views, and the kind of peace that many people spend their adult lives searching for." Her grandparents never sat her down and explained what wealth was. They simply lived it. "I didn't grow up with everything I wanted. But I grew up with almost everything I truly needed."

The hardest gift her mother ever gave her arrived at the moment she was most certain she needed rescuing.

She had given birth to her first child and had managed to cover nearly all the hospital costs herself. At discharge, she was short five thousand pesos. So she called her mother, explained, and asked for the loan.

"You got yourself into this. You can get yourself out."

"I won't pretend it didn't hurt," Ethel says. It took years to see what had actually happened in that phone call. Her mother has always believed that every decision arrives with its consequence attached. She was never the parent who handed over the answer. She was the one who helped you find your way to it. "She only finished Grade 2, yet some of the greatest wisdom I've ever received came from her. I've met highly educated people throughout my career, but very few have matched the clarity, practicality, resilience, and emotional intelligence that my mother has always carried."

She wasn't refusing to help. She was refusing to let her daughter believe she was helpless. That single lesson became the architecture of an entire life. Today, when Ethel faces something difficult, her instinct isn't to ask who can solve this. It's to ask how she will solve it. "My mother taught me that accountability isn't punishment. It's freedom. Once you accept that your decisions belong to you, you also realize that your future belongs to you."

She wanted to be a lawyer. She wanted to be a singer. She became something she hadn't planned for, and it turned out to be exactly right.

The lawyer dream came from watching her family sign documents they couldn't fully understand, from the question a child forms watching the people she loves navigate a world that doesn't explain its rules. She wanted to become the person her family never had. The singing dream came from her mother, who coached her to perform, who believed her daughter might carry the dream she herself never got to chase.

Life took her somewhere unexpected. Working beside a lawyer at a yacht club, she realized she didn't need to become one to protect people. He taught her something more durable than legal knowledge. "Before you can defend anyone else, you must first learn to stand up for yourself." He taught her to know herself, trust herself, organize her thinking, and decide from principle rather than fear. A second mentor, the owner of a liveaboard yacht cruising the Tubbataha Reefs, taught her how a business actually runs, where decisions affect both people and the bottom line simultaneously.

When she finally told her employer she was leaving, he told her she'd always be welcome back. Then he said she would be difficult to replace. "For the first time, I felt that someone I deeply admired truly believed in me." Knowing she had a place to return to didn't make her want to go back. It made her brave enough to keep moving forward.

The stage she wanted as a child? She found it. She just didn't expect it to be made of classrooms. "Today, I still stand on stages, but instead of performing, I teach. I mentor. I tell stories." The energy is the same. The connection is the same. Only the purpose has deepened.

The story behind TJ, she says, is actually quite funny.

She has always looked a little different from what people expect of a Filipina. Taller, stronger in build, thick eyebrows, fuller lips, a naturally deeper voice. Strangers have occasionally mistaken her for being transgender. Her closest friends in the LGBTQ+ community knew this happened constantly, and one day, after teasing her about yet another incident, they gave her a new name. TJ. It stuck.

The real turning point came at an event, when a transgender woman approached her respectfully and asked, with an apology in advance, whether she had had surgery. When Ethel said no, the woman explained that many transgender women admire precisely the features Ethel has naturally. Her height, her proportions, her strong facial structure, her morena complexion. Those qualities, she said, are what many people strive toward.

"What touched me wasn't simply being complimented. It was realizing that someone saw beauty in the very things I had spent years questioning." She had been rejected for a front desk position because of her dark skin. She had measured herself against standards she never chose. "There isn't only one version of beauty. It's about becoming comfortable in your own." The name TJ remained. It is a daily reminder to remain exactly who she is, and to find the humor in anyone who tries to tell her otherwise.

he can still see the afternoon exactly. Good Friday, three o'clock, aboard the liveaboard in the Tubbataha Reefs.

The sea was completely still. It looked almost like oil. She asked the captain why. "It's usually like this on Good Friday," he said simply. The answer stayed with her. Standing there, looking at that glassy water, a question arrived that she hadn't planned for. If God called her into an emergency meeting today, and asked what she had done with the life He entrusted to her, what would she honestly say?

She had a stable career. She was managing operations. On paper, life looked successful. "But inside, I knew something was missing. Purpose." The question stayed with her for six months while she prayed and reflected. Then the direction came clear. She moved into insurance, then into education, then into speaking in front of students. When she stood before her first audience, something simply felt right. "They aren't simply the future. They're people who need someone to believe in them today."

She was raised in the mountains by her grandparents. Her biological father was not part of that picture for most of her life. A lifetime, essentially, of estrangement.

Two years ago, he acknowledged her. She opened the door. She lives in his village now.

It is the quiet counterweight to all that grit. Accountability taught her not to wait for anyone. It did not teach her to refuse them when they finally came. Every season has something to teach you, she says. Don't waste any of them. She isn't speaking theoretically.

There is a correction she wants on the record. Her mission was never limited to virtual assistants. "My vision has always been much broader. It's about helping Filipinos, especially young people, discover who they are, prepare themselves for the future, and confidently pursue opportunities wherever those may be."

The name carries it. The "I" in iStart represents you. "It reminds us that every meaningful journey begins with ourselves, with self-awareness, accountability, responsibility, purpose, and the courage to own our lives." iMentor exists because opportunity alone isn't enough. Young people need someone willing to say: I've walked this road before. Let me help you avoid some of the mistakes I made.

Ask her what she'd tell the girl in the mountains, and she doesn't hesitate. "The world is so much bigger than you can imagine. Don't be afraid of the journey. Don't rush through the difficult seasons just because they're painful. Feel them. Learn from them. Because one day, you'll realize that every hardship is shaping you into someone capable of helping others."

And for the young person in a province somewhere, convinced their story is already written, she offers the ritual she has kept for years. Every birthday she pauses, looks back on the year, thanks herself for surviving the difficult days, and celebrates the lessons. She calls it Self-Appreciation Day. "Confidence isn't built by applause. It's built by the quiet conversations you have with yourself when nobody else is watching."

Then take action. Don't wait. "Never let where you came from convince you where you have to end up."

I think about that first message in my inbox, and the woman on the other end of it who was crossing the country knocking on doors because nobody had appointed her to do it. Ethel Morales grew up watering roses before sunrise, studying by kerosene light, believing she was poor until she was old enough to understand she had been rich the whole time. She wanted to protect people, so she learned to protect them without the degree. She wanted a stage, and she found one made of classrooms.

She is still doing the only thing she has ever known how to do. Up before the sun, tending something fragile that will bloom long after she stops watching. The roses were only ever practice. "If a little girl from the mountains of Cebu, carrying one notebook, walking six kilometers to school every day, could build a life beyond what she once imagined, then your story is still being written too. You just have to be willing to write the next chapter."

Ethel "TJ" Morales is the founder of iStart International and its iMentor program, working to help young Filipinos discover their potential and build their futures.