There once lived a poor old man named Mang Manoy who had barely enough to live on. He waited each morning in front of the small bakery where the owner, Mang Jun, would give him a small bag of small pandesals that were made from leftover dough. No one else would buy such pandesals so Mang Jun would just give them away instead of throwing them away in the trash.
Mang Manoy would then take this small bag of pandesals home — a small shanty across town — to his grandchildren. He would have to ensure that the pandesals would be divided equally among his grandchildren and that it would last the whole day. They won’t be getting any other food aside from these pandesals.
Then one day, Mang Jun died and one of his children, Carlito, took over the business. But as the new owner, Carlito wasn’t like his father. Whenever Carlito saw Mang Manoy waiting for the pandesals, he would push him away from the store. But the bakers who were loyal to the original owner, would secretly give the old man a small bag of pandesals when the new owner wasn’t looking.
Carlito found out about this and he became very angry. He was thinking about what to do when he saw a bag of aging and foul smelling flour near the back of the bakery’s. He then ordered the bakers to use the flour to bake pandesals out of it. The bakers started to protest but Carlito threatened that he will fire them from their jobs if they did not do as they were told. Since the bakers had their own families to worry about, they baked the pandesals. When the bakers were done, the pandesals smelled so bad that they couldn’t even imagine giving it to Mang Manoy. Carlito then placed the foul smelling pandesals in a bag and gave them to the old man.
Mang Manoy had no choice but to take the pandesals as he had to feed his grandchildren. When he reached home, he divided the pandesals among his grandchildren as he always had. The pandesals smelled so bad but since they were hungry they had no choice but to eat them. As they were eating, they felt several small hard things inside their mouths. When they spit out the hard things on their hands, the children and Mang Manoy saw that they were very shiny. They then realized that the hard stuff were diamonds! They began to open the rest of the pandesals and found even more diamonds!
The old man and his grandchildren sold some of the diamonds to buy themselves a decent house. With their new fortune, Mang Manoy never had to wait for pandesals at the bakery anymore! Soon however, Carlito found out what happened. He called up his lawyers because to sue the old man for stealing the diamonds. However, his lawyers found the last will and testament of Mang Jun — Carlito’s father and the original owner of the bakery — and soon learned that Mang Jun left the diamonds to whoever found them inside pandesals! That meant that Mang Manoy and his grandchildren were the rightful owners of the diamonds!
Soon, the old man and his grandchildren started their own bakery business. The bakers from Carlito’s bakery left him to work at Mang Manoy’s bakery. Not long after, Carlito had to close down his bakery because no one was buying pandesals from him anymore. Everyone was buying pandesals from the Mang Manoy where every poor person in town was welcome to have free meals the whole day!