Kezia Badulid

Kezia Lounel C. Badulid has been groomed to care for and help others since she was a child. Growing up in a small city in the Philippines, her childhood home was a “community resource house”, where her parents would provide technical assistance to the population, among other services – free of charge.

No, her parents were not politicians, but her Mom was the unofficial head of 2 big clans while her Dad was 2nd-in-line to the head of his clan, long before they were officially elected as such when they formed their clan associations. They had people coming from the whole island to get their assistance, and from Tacloban too. Samar is the 3rd largest island in the Philippines, 1.5x the size of Clark County in Nevada.

The siblings have a lot of stories of their house being the neighborhood storm shelter, the first-aid center, the free legal aid center, daycare center, halfway house (for runaway teenagers and adults, fighting spouses, recovering addicts, etc.), convalescence and hospice center, mini-zoo, and later the “Bookworms’ Haven” library.

Growing up in that house and family, Kezia was groomed for those responsibilities at a very young age. At first, Kezia just watched and learned about various tasks that needed to be performed, and did basic tasks and errands. Although whose parents even in the mid-80s would send their 7-year-old daughter out of town unsupervised!  However, she has been training since she was 2 years old, and was also well known by a lot of extended family and friends by sight, even towns away, so her parents were secured in knowing that she had a lot of people watching out for her even if she doesn’t know them yet.

Some of her earlier tasks included helping people navigate the complicated government, banking and hospital processes by going with said people with a note of instruction or introduction from her Mom; typing up documents (she learned to type at age 7 on a Underwood-like typewriter!); to assisting her Mom in providing both emotional and organizational support during personal, family and community catastrophic events. For example, when the sole breadwinner in a blue-collar family is suddenly hospitalized: as Patient Advocates, they would help the family navigate confusing medical treatment decisions, apply for and obtain free or cheaper services, and in general just make sure that they are being attended to properly, in a place where there is a lot of bureaucracy and outright neglect.

By age 10, she was handling complex tasks such as guiding new patients through the ‘hospital process’, including translating medical jargon and coaching patients on providing an accurate representation of her condition — to ensure proper treatment. Many doctors are not good with explaining things in terms that patients would understand, or doesn’t bother at all, and a lot of patients also tend to just disclose the minimum information because they don’t think of information that might be relevant to their condition and diagnoses and many are too shy or too worried about wasting the doctor’s time. Think of her as the very nice middle-aged friend that knows a lot about the hospital process well, because they have been there so many times. At age 10!

She didn’t want to be a doctor, but she was trained for it at an early age anyway, just like her parents and other extended family members trained her in multiple trades and professions by getting “voluntold” or “apprenticed” during school holidays. Her first Incision & Drainage (I&D) was before she was 7yo, on herself, on a boil. Her first wound suturing was with their family dog who got stabbed by a drunk neighbor when she was 12yo. 

At age 15, Kezia combined her affinity for voracious reading on a variety of subjects with her desire to help others, and expanded their already huge home library, so they could open it to the public. The other public libraries not only had mostly outdated books or none at all for specific subjects, but many of the librarians also didn’t really know how to help the public with their various subject-specific problems. Whereas, at Bookworms’ Haven, the family of bookworms had a huge collection of not just novels, but also a lot of classic and modern fiction, non-fiction books, textbooks and resource books, workbooks, reviewers, etc., but could also point to you exactly which psychology, legal, engineering, agriculture, math, science, or reviewer you could find what you need, and even spend a few minutes explaining a few things for you. It was like having Google before we had search engines.

Kezia was also 15 years old when she attended one the most prestigious university in the Philippines, the University of the Philippines, Diliman – the MIT or Harvard of the universities in the Philippines. She was accepted into two different quota courses: Computer Science and the double major Business Administration and Accountancy. However, she was also head hunted by both by the Regional DOST Director and the Director of the National Institute of Physics to join their physics program, and enticed with their much higher DOST scholarship stipends compared to her UP Government Scholarship. However, after her first year, Kezia decided to explore other areas in depth, including Journalism, Pre-Law and Psychology, until she eventually changed majors and graduated with a Psychology degree. One of her accomplishments while a Psychology student, was in helping diagnose her grandfather’s early onset dementia, and helping educate not just her family but most of the town on the management of that condition, and also helping reduce its stigma. Despite the multiple challenges brought on by Newman-Pick disease, said grandfather lived up to his mid-80s under their care.

On school breaks and after graduation, aside from her “apprenticeships”, she enjoyed her volunteer work at her hometown. One of them was organizing and conducting free summer classes for upcoming seniors applying for the top schools in the country, which resulted in up to 7x the previous passing rates, especially for UP Diliman which is the top school in the country. She also created and wrote for the first online news and community forums website for the province, long before Friendster and Facebook became popular.

When she started working officially in 2004, she was among the first WFH workers in the Philippines, and worked online from her hometown. One of her first jobs was her data-entry and QA work for Priorsmart, a start-up that patent lawyers used for searching and monitoring USPTO dockets and applications, and also for patent litigation alerts. She was quickly promoted to Customer Service Manager, and stayed with the patent analytics company until it was sold in 2011 to RPX, and this was also about the same time that she married the love her life and immigrated to the US.

She continued working with mostly the same team, for multiple successful start-ups as a specialist in various fields including Production Quality Assurance Specialist, HR and Payroll Administrator, Operations Manager, Project Manager, etc.

Her longest-running project is with Pit Rho, the data analytics company that provides real-time motorsports strategy for NASCAR races, which has since been acquired by GM Motorsports in mid-2022. She has been with Pit Rho at its conception and is still working with GM Motorsports now through her own Operations and Project Management company that caters to small tech start-ups to Fortune 100 companies.

Kezia will probably not stay on as our office manager after a year or two, as she likes to stay challenged and she likes being flexible with her own work, but she also gets the most enjoyment out of helping people and organizing things, so we might just be able to make her stay. One of the first things she did when she moved to our new house and neighborhood, was to go house to house and introduce herself to our neighbors. And when it became apparent that most were strangers to each other and weren’t aware of the crime happening in the area, she organized the neighborhood watch not just in our immediate neighborhood but also helped other nearby neighborhoods to organize theirs.