The Road not Taken

This may sound too cliché but I’m taking my chances.

As part of our final project in my WRITING FOR TV AND RADIO class, we were required to present a documentary exposing the prevalent glitches of the Philippine society. My partner and I chose to probe on the theme of poverty particularly poverty at a child’s point of view. After several weeks of deliberation, we finally decided to shoot at the mountains of Mambukal. And that’s where sojourn began…

We were able to capture poverty at its finest. The children there had to walk several miles just to go to school. It actually takes them a couple of hours to reach school which means that they have to wake up a lot earlier. Unlike us, especially me who lives just a few minutes away from school, we still clamor about how tiring it is to go to school. How ironic. They still strive to go to study regardless of their situation, considering that the families there didn’t have stable earnings and they only relied on commissions.

It surely brought about a lot of awareness to me and ten pages wouldn’t probably suffice if I would describe how we captured the lives of the populace at Murcia. So I would now share to you some of our shots which are mostly screen grabs of our videos. I can say that my partner and I have been through a lot but we’ve managed to get through.  I mean, climbing up a very steep highland is no joke. We had to leave the city at daybreak and spend several hours hiking. Hiking is easy. I love hiking. But hiking with several pounds against your back isn’t easy at all. We had to bring our camera, tripod, laptop, clothes and other stuff with us as we were trekking.

We could have chosen to cover the life of a street child instead, to make our lives stress-free. We could have interviewed a juvenile purveyor at the sidewalk just for the sake of compliance but then we didn’t want to defy what the task was all about. It was all about immersing into a communtiy and gaining empirical knowledge. It was our choice- a choice we don’t regret despite the odds. The whole experience was all at once challenging, exhausting, agonizing, but through it all, inspiring.  A road not taken, indeed.