Day 18: Labor Day

I covered today’s event at Baguio Convention Center. Well, I was not supposed to be the one who should be covering this event. Mia, Nikka and I had already decided who would be covering events for the week and today, Nikka should be the one to cover the job’s fair that would happen at Conve. But since Nikka texted me that she couldn’t make it this morning because she was feeling ill, I had to go there and cover the event. The problem was I only read her text message 30 minutes before the start of the opening program of the event because I stayed up late last night and woke up late this morning.

So I hurriedly did my morning rituals and went straight to Baguio Convention Center. When I arrived there, there were already many job seekers everywhere. At the entrance of the Conve, a looooooong line of job seekers stood. I had to call Ker to confirm if I need not to fall in line anymore. She said yes but still…I brought out my intern’s ID just to be sure. I approached the man who was guarding the entrance and introduced myself as an intern from Amianan while showing my intern’s ID. He looked at it and said “sige po, pasok lang po kayo.” And I marched inside…like a boss. Lol

The number of people inside was incomparable compared to the people outside the Convention Center. Over 30 booths of employers were also there and in each booth, a loooooooooooooong line of job seekers were there, patiently waiting for their turn to be interviewed. People of different walks of life were there. On stage, Bong Bastic of 103.1 MOR Baguio was speaking. I am thankful enough that the opening program hasn’t finished yet when I arrived there. I saw Ker and paired up  (again) with her. Seriously, it’s more fun to do legworks with a buddy. Hehe.

The program then proceeded to the awarding of livelihood projects then the awarding of scholarships to OWWA graduates. One of the OWWA graduates was Celine Matundan. She graduated as a Cum Laude from UP Baguio and I happened to have the same class with her in PI 100. I always admired her back then. She’s very simple yet she has everything a girl could’ve wished for (beauty and brains). After the awarding ceremony, we interviewed her. That was when I learned that his Dad has been in Saudi for thirty years now and she even shared that even though her father was far away from her family, they did not fail to communicate with each other. And I thought, at that moment, that his father might be really proud of her achievements. After our interview with her, we also interviewed the Director of Owwa, Manuela Peña regarding the OWWA scholarship program.

After that, Ker and I went with Erica and Riza in searching for job seekers to be interviewed. We interviewed a man regarding the job fair. The interview went well except that he went blank when Riza asked about his opinion of the success rate of the said job fair.  Haha. After that, we went outside the Conve to interview more job seekers. But then, we got distracted by the different stalls set outside the Convention Center. And then we forgot about interviewing more people and just took photos of the people looking at bulletin boards of the different employers. After that, we decided to head home contented with the information we gathered. :D