Young people far and wide, in our country and in other countries as well have played an important part in promoting critical causes even before the pandemic struck: climate change, making poverty history, protesting inequality and injustice, promoting women’s issues and protesting domestic violence, advocating good governance and shouting down corruption in high places in governments and private enterprises, promoting workers’ rights and ethical practices in business, transparency and accountability in governance at all levels, and freedom of information and dissent. During the quarantine period, young people were equally involved in different ways. In this piece written on 8 April 2020, a small inspiring story of two siblings who refused to sit still during the quarantine period to do more is shared.
Written on 24 March 2020 as a contribution to the efforts to convince people to stay put and stay home as a first response to the appeal made to citizens. Taking off from a line in the poet John Milton’s Sonnet on his efforts to overcome obstacles imposed by his blindness, the piece provides a rationale for staying put in place to try and put a stop to the pandemic that was beginning to grow in the country as it swept other parts of the globe. This piece was published in Rappler and an adapted version in the Jesuit magazine, America, in NY, USA
(Written on 28 March 2020 as an attempt to draw lessons from a thirty-day silent retreat I had taken years ago in relation to the lockdown that was declared in the whole of Luzon. Drawing lessons from the experience, I enumerate the seven-steps formula in the following order: Re-Purpose, Routinize, Re-Focus, Re-Charge, Re-Assess, Re-Connect, and Realize.)
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