Emil and I met when he was in the UK in 2007. He’s from The Philippines and was visiting his daughter who lives in Taunton, Somerset. His wife had recently died of a stroke. For 7 years he’d been her sole carer, giving up work to look after her 24 hours a day.

Emil’s daughter put an ad on the internet for someone to help with his English. I’d trained some years ago to teach English as a second language and was intrigued by this. We made contact and arranged to meet. We went to a nearby café and talked for hours. We both knew we’d met someone special. “I saw in Janet the picture of my grandmother because her features are like hers,” says Emil. “I felt I’m near to her.”

I invited him to go to a barn dance with me. Emil was at a disadvantage because he couldn’t understand the caller, and that type of dancing was unknown to him, but I was pleased to see he had a natural sense of rhythm and loved moving to music.

Soon we were inseparable, but we only had 3 months together as Emil’s visa ran out. It was to be another 2 years before we met again. I’d planned to go to the Philippines in 2008 but my mother died, so it was 2009 before I went. A year later, on December 2nd 2010, I brought Emil over on a visit.

I do a lot of dancing and took Emil along to the classes. He showed a surprising talent for English country dancing and soon picked up the moves and the special terms such as “right hand star”, “Grimstock” and “3 changes”.

For some years I’ve entertained the elderly at lunch clubs and sheltered housing schemes, playing their favourite songs on my keyboard. Filipinos are good with the elderly and at first I had the idea that Emil would be invaluable in getting the audience to move about and join in. But Filipinos just love music and dance so as soon as I played a lively song, particularly one with a Latin American beat like the Cha Cha, Emil would start dancing. The audience loved it! Filipinos are taught to move gracefully as soon as they can walk, and don’t suffer from embarrassment or nerves!

I decided to give Emil a special spot of his own and looked for some lively dances he could perform. The first one was The Mexican Hat Dance. While I played, Emil would do his dancing, with a large Mexican hat on his head. I didn’t have to tell him what to do, I just left it to him. The audience loved to see him and were soon smiling and laughing and sometimes dancing too.

Another dance we do is Super Barrio, named after a Mexican super hero who arrives in the nick of time, to lead the neighbours in protest when a poor family is being evicted by an evil landlord. Emil dressed up in a mask, gloves and Spanish hat and pretended to do some sword fighting.

Our most popular dance, though, is the Coconut Dance. This is a traditional Filipino dance usually performed by half a dozen semi naked and athletic young men! Emil set about adapting it. He bought 4 coconuts, split them in half and removed the flesh. He drilled a hole in each piece and attached some elastic so he could fix them to his knees, waist and chest. As I played the music on my keyboard, he hammered out a rhythm on the coconuts. It went down really well!

Emil loves to sing and performs My Way and Moon River at the gigs. He loves his native folk songs and has performed Buhay Kobo (a children’s song naming vegetables) and Babalik (‘Return to Me’) in public. We are currently making a collection of traditional Filipino songs and dances as, to my knowledge, these are not available in sheet music form in the UK. We aim to perform them at festivals and other events.

Emil’s life here is very different from back home. There, he is poor and lives a very basic existence with his daughter and great grandson in a small, one-bedroom bungalow made of concrete with a galvanised iron roof. They have few possessions as most things have been sold and there’s no running water in the house – it is collected from a well in the garden. They live from hand to mouth, not knowing from one day to the next where the money will come from to eat. The washing is done by hand and cooking done on a charcoal fire when they can’t afford a gas cylinder.

The cultures are different too. Filipinos are dependent on their families, while here we pride ourselves on our independence. Men are ‘head of the household’ and still have old fashioned ideas about women. I had to laugh when Emil said, “Women can’t climb coconut trees because they have breasts”.

Emil says, “When I was in the Philippines I didn’t think that I can perform anything because I haven’t had that experience but I’ve learned that old people wanted me to dance and they would stand up and try to dance with me. I feel happy giving enjoyment to the people around me. I love to serve old people and in this country I’ve learned that regardless of age, they won’t mind you. There in The Philippines once they see old people dancing and enjoying themselves they will joke. When I got older I just wanted to sit around, go to a cock fight and gamble. That was my life. Here, modesty aside, I enjoy people admiring my dancing.”

Read more about Janet and Emil’s music making at www.janetmaile.co.uk.