Sunday, May 16, 2010
of airport stories and elections (unrelated, really)
luck does really run out after all. after getting away with waking up at 3:59am for a 5am flight some 3 weeks ago, i find myself here at the puerto princesa airport waiting if i can get into the 5:55pm pal flight. unlike the Iloilo flight 3 weeks back, this time, i was idly having lunch with tess (ahrc intern assigned here in elac puerto princesa) and ate lorie (elac coron’s project coordinator when I did my internship there in 2005) in a restaurant 5 minutes away from the airport. i missed the check in time by 5 minutes, and the person in front of me was the last one accommodated for the flight. the airline staff would later inform me that had I arrived on time, i would have gotten a free ticket. anyway, i had been wanting to blog for the past days but work (or procrastination) took precedence.
last monday, the first automated elections took place in the country. i volunteered to do election work for the legal network for truthful elections (lente), and was sent to monitor the elections in bulacan. the elections were rather uneventful, to say the least. not that it went smoothly, in fact there are problems that needed to be addressed. while doing the rounds in selected voting centers some time late afternoon, i was chatting with some ppcrv volunteers when a guy approached us. apparently, the pcos machine in one of the precincts bogged down in the morning. he was concerned because the filled up ballots (which were quite thick already) were just stacked on top of the table in plain view of everyone else. he was asking about procedures, which i gladly answered. much later we asked him if he was a pollwatcher for any candidate or part of the board of election inspectors. to both, he answered in the negative. he was a concerned citizen / voter. i simply thanked him for his concern and told him that this country needs more people like him.
after reflecting over the occurrences that day, i realized that we need more people like him, the guy overly concerned with the ballots. indeed, the philippines is never short of heroes -- “ordinary” people who care for this nation. before he left us i told him, “kuya, bilib ako sayo. mabuhay ka!”
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postscript: while luck sometimes does run out, God is good. i had already checked-in and will be manila-bound (and back to reality) later at 5:55. :)
