Elias was a selfless man bound by a code of honor. Growing up wealthy, he was initially
an arrogant individual; his quarreling with a relative and beating up his disguised father was
emblematic of this. After losing everything and learning the true history of his family, Elias
dedicated himself to helping those also oppressed by society. To this end, he worked with
Capitan Pablo’s bandits and lived the life of a fugitive.

Elias’ life was tough, the challenges and conflicts he faced was more tragic comparing to
what most of us are experiencing. Like most of the Filipinos in this era, people are still
struggling to survive with all the problems continuously and inevitably rising. Opportunities and
rights are being taken away from the people, similarly to Elias’ experience during the Spanish
regime. Yet, all of this problems and challenges does not hinder Filipinos to do everything to
survive and eventually achieve wealth, just like Elias, we Filipinos have this characteristic called
resilience. It is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties and to cope up in every situation
thrown onto us.

I personally admire Elias’ strong will to do and administer change into the society, his
strong will held him up to continue living in an atrocious society and was inspired to not let other
people experienced what he experienced. Compassion and empathy was shown by Elias and he
used it as his fuel to help the oppressed and to serve the people who were neglected by the
society.

Resilience. It is the ability to withstand adversity and bounce back from difficult life
events. It is very admired to us Filipinos but is being romanticized by many people. Everything
has its own boundaries, we can withstand hardships and challenges but we should let ourselves
be oppressed or neglected by anyone, especially the government. In this chapter, it shows how
Elias and his family are continuously being threatened and oppressed by the Spaniards. Just like
today, we Filipinos are Elias and his family, being oppressed and threatened by our own
government, opportunities and rights are being taken away, we need to make a change and help
each other. We should stand with each other and survive together.
Compassion and Empathy. It is an emotional response to sympathy and creates a desire
to held and our feeling of awareness towards other people's emotions and an attempt to
understand how they feel. These two characteristics demonstrated by Elias in this chapter is need
in our society, we shall remove our mentality to bring other people down since it is unnecessary.
With this characteristics, we can attain rich and fruitful relationship between other people and
shall help us in having unity and strength.