Photo Courtesy of Sandra Lizano
Edna Grant
Staff Writer
Information Technology and Business student Leighiam Virrey works as a Student Supervisor in the IT department at Idaho State University. When he was a kid in the city of Makati Manila, Leighiam played with spiders.
In the Philippines, where spiders grow as large as the palm of a hand, children would put the spiders on the end of long sticks and fight the other children.
“It was really fun at the time,” said Virrey, eyes alight with the memory.
Virrey was born in Quezon City, to a family with long laid-out plans to immigrate to the United States.
“The plans were made before I was born,” Virrey said. “It started with my grandma.”
The process to move to the US took about 13 years. His grandmother had lived in Hong Kong for a time, learning working and learning Chinese languages. Her employer eagerly helped her learn, and provided her with resources to learn the English Language as well. From there, Virrey’s grandmother was able to move to California, where she began the paperwork process for her daughter, Virrey’s mother, to follow her there.
California, according to Virrey, was a very busy immigration state. The state received so many applications for legal residency that the process became very slow and incredibly long. So Virrey’s grandmother moved to Idaho, where she could find an affordable house and a slightly quicker process.
For the first 12 years of his life, Virrey’s parents never married.
“It was a plan for them to not get married, so that there wouldn’t be any complications with their papers,” Virrey said. His parents had arranged to remain unmarried until they were able to both move. Then they would marry in the United States.
When he was 13, Virrey and his family made it to Parker, Idaho. Without his father.
The plan his parents made so long ago changed.
After they settled in to their new life in Idaho, Virrey’s mother returned to the Philippines where she and his father were finally married. They returned when Virrey was fifteen years old, and when he graduated high school, his father was able to witness the graduation from the audience.
“I didn’t know he was coming,” Virrey said. “It was a surprise, and I didn’t know what to say.”
At ISU, Virrey’s life is very different from what it was all those years ago in Makati. Though working on computers is a far cry from fighting spiders, Virrey still remembers his days in the Philippines with fondness.
Virrey grew up in a neighborhood that was close to the Manila bay passage. He recalls that as a child, he never got a fancy pool to swim in, so the Manila bay made an excellent alternative.
“Two of my friends and I went there, and dived in,” he said. “It sounds great, but the worst thing is that it’s filled with trash.”
The Manila bay, though it may have sparkling blue water in the brochure pictures, has a murky hue in reality. According to Virrey, the bay was a dark green and brown color, with bits of floating junk and a handful of dead rats.
“It sounded like a lot of fun at the time,” he said. “It didn’t bother us.”
Now, Virrey studies IT and business, a combination designed to make his IT degree more profitable.
“As an IT person, we’re very quiet and keep to ourselves,” he said. “Going into business management, too, I can learn a little bit more about the business side of things.”
Business management, according to Virrey, is a way to force himself out of the “IT basement” and to interact with more people in the workplace.
“I hope to run system administration for businesses in the future,” he said.
