A SUMMER FLING

Gene Lloyd Torres

Everyone wants to do something worth their time, especially for those whose summer vacation is just around the corner. Summer is a time for fun, a time for doing things we don’t regularly do. Summer is that blank in a sentence that needs to be filled in to make the sentence describing our year complete.

Some fifteen individuals could have been anywhere in the Philippines: Boracay, Baguio, or Batanes. These people could have been seeing the world before classes open again. They could have been anywhere. But they chose to be there in a small conference room in Ateneo de Manila University, learning the basics of social development work.

Caucus of Development NGO Networks (CODE-NGO) organized the second Young Writers’ Summer Program, with the aim of providing opportunities for the volunteers “to strengthen their writing and research abilities through exposure and hands-on experience”, and instilling “positive attitude, heighten motivation and develop team work and good collaboration skills towards becoming committed volunteers for social development.” A three-day workshop last May 5-7, 2014 was held to equip the fifteen participants with the needed basic knowledge and skills to be able to survive their one-week deployment to various places across the country.

In activities like these, you would expect that most of its participants will come from the liberal arts. Actually, some academic fields represented in this year’s program are Political Science, Development Communication, and even Medicine. At first, participants were very shy to introduce themselves. After all, this is not high school nor college; it is a class made up of people of differing ages, backgrounds, and experiences. Furthermore, the need to know each other is a must, since some deployments to an area will be done in pairs, so as early as they can, rapport must be built among the participants. 

The lectures for the two days that followed further improved their skills. They had discussions on pakikipagkapwa-tao (regard for others), research and social media. Apart from the in-house training, participants also had gone to the offices of Philippine Daily Inquirer in Makati and Rappler in Ortigas, and met with media practitioners for mentoring sessions on writing. The workshop taught them how to effectively cover good practices of civil society organizations (CSOs) through interaction with the communities where they will be deployed.

The entire workshop seems to have quickly passed by for the participants, but the call to engage in social development work is now in their minds.

They are ready.

Days later, the fifteen participants, now volunteer writers, were deployed to their respective communities. Most of them went to Bicol, Laguna, and Eastern Visayas. One volunteer writer went to Coron, Palawan, while two other volunteer writers were sent to Dipolog, Zamboanga del Norte. For one week, they immersed themselves to the ways of living of CSOs and of the people in the community. They had interactions with key people, interviewed beneficiaries of CSO projects, and involved themselves in some of the works of the organizations.

From May 12 to 17, some experiences totally changed how the volunteer writers view the situations of others. One had the experience of going to an urban poor community and saw that they produce decorative cards with thematic messages for a living. Some visited regions that were affected by Typhoon Yolanda, and observed how CSOs and the people work hand in hand in rebuilding their lives. A pair of volunteer writers visited Zamboanga del Norte, in the region which made headlines last year because of the clashes between government and rebel forces that left thousands of people displaced, several civilians dead, and local trade halted. When they all came back to Manila, many wonderful experiences were recounted in the spirit of sharing what they had gone through in their respective deployments, and turned into articles and reflection papers that were submitted for editing and publication.

Summer will always be a time for fun. Summer will always be associated with white sand and tan lines. For the volunteer writers, however, this #CODEsummer is an episode that they will recount in a few years, because of the connections forged and because of the reflections made. For them, a week spent in communities exposing the good in people will always be worth their time and thinking. Such challenge comes only once, and that challenge was what they accepted.

Gene Lloyd Torres is one of the 15 volunteers who joined the CODE-NGO Young Writers Summer Camp 2014. He is a graduating Political Science student from University of the Philippines – Diliman. He is exposed to qualitative and quantitative approaches to research, and has employed such for his papers on the Sangguniang Kabataan, day care services and ASEAN. Given his background in research, his personal interest in Korean popular culture comes not as a surprise.