1. Since the pandemic, I have been doing online consultations. I volunteer my medical services to street dwellers now housed in the Barangay San Roque gymnasium in Cebu City. They were living in the streets for several years before they were brought by the Cebu City government people to be housed in the gym when the lockdown was implemented last March. Their essential needs are being taken cared of by the Augustinian Relief Services (ARS) of the Basilica Minore del Sto. Nino Church and the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation. The social worker, Ms. Ivy, calls me if there are patients whom I check up online and diagnose and prescribe medicines. There were also two boys and one adult whose admission in Cebu Velez General Hospital I facilitated and whose hospital bills my high school classmates subsidized after my appeal for help. Yesterday, we did an incision and drainage for a breast abscess of a 74-year old street dweller. Currently, the Sto. Nino Augustinian Foundation (SNAF) is coming up with a plan for a relocation site for selected families; they are going to be huge container vans (like what you see in the ports) that will be furnished and placed along an empty lot in the South Reclamation Properties. I shall help design a health program for the resettled families. I also volunteered my services for the Basilica Church community (employees and friars) when they had a positive COVID-19 by advising them what to do. I studied the DOH Memorandums and guidelines on COVID-19 and contacted the Cebu City Health Department who sent a team to do mass testing (41 persons) in the Basilica compound.
2. I have a skill in writing project proposals. I wrote three project proposals for my NGO, the Visayas Primary Health Care Services, Inc. that works with people's organizations in marginalized communities in Cebu to develop community-based health programs. One proposal was sent to the Zayed Sustainability Prize based in the United Arab Emirates. Another was sent to the Conservation, Food and Health in U.S.A. Both proposals were for building CBHPs in poor urban communities in Cebu. Still awaiting word from them. Another proposal was to strengthen capability of four LGUs in north Cebu on their COVID-19 response, submitted to the RTI International under a USAID grant. This last proposal was approved and my NGO shall start implementing this five-month project this August.
3 My experiences of despair and hope were all vicarious. By updating myself with the news on the events in the country and in the world, i have felt the despair of thousands of people, the poverty, sufferings, ill health as an onslaught of the pandemic. The pandemic has caused massive distress on families and made thousands of people suffer. Loss of jobs here and abroad among our OFWs, crisis in the health care system with overworked, dying or dead frontliners fearing for their lives, overwhelmed hospitals, the hunger, starvation and miseries of families particularly in the informal sectors, jeepney drivers without jobs and begging in the streets, the LSI's crying to go home to their provinces, thousands lining up for their SAP financial assistance but not finding their names in the list (there was a poor man who died while lining up), the poor not knowing where and how to get their next meal for their children, the anxieties of families of OFWs who died in Saudi Arabia and had to wait painfully for their bodies to be flown here. And now, the attack on press freedom with the denial of the ABS-CBN franchise renewal and the impending loss of jobs of 11,000 employees. These and many more alarming news we hear everyday.
But I always believe that Filipinos are very resilient and strong, and we do not allow ourselves to be oppressed or kept wallowing in the mud. The relief goods, the support, the assistance that various sectors have poured in to alleviate the plight of the hope gives hope for a better future, at least for a few days when there is food on the table. The economy is opening up, bringing in more hope for those who have lost jobs during the lockdown. We see also in the news the protests that people are crying, the rallies, the vigils in the ABS-CBN compound, the NUPL lawyers' efforts to assert the people's basic rights, the heroism of our frontliners, the many countless multisectoral efforts to give hope to our nation and our future generations.
All these experiences during the pandemic will always be etched in the history of our country. We just hope and pray that genuine freedom from poverty and oppression for the majority of our people shall be savored in the near future. And we all have our roles and responsibilities to achieve this.