Okay. I’m sorry I haven’t been writing in my journal. The school year just ended. I am now done with my sophomore year. It’s not been the best year for my class. It may be the worst. But anyway, I’ll talk about that later or tomorrow or whenever I have the time.

It’s nice to be writing back. I’m really sorry to those who frequent this site in hoping of finding a new entry (I doubt it, but I’m sorry anyway). Anyway, here I am and I’m back. Not for long though.

I won’t be writing here for another week or more. Here is why:

You see, our school has this Banlaw Summer Program where students could volunteer to spend one whole week after classes end (which is today) and live with one poor fisherfolk family in Zambales province. It’s to live out our compassion as Atenean Christians. As a well, uh, er, as a person who would like to practice out my Christian commitment as a student of Ateneo, I answered the call and I volunteered. I am one of the 14 out of 2,000 or so students who volunteered this summer. So I’ll be leaving tomorrow for Cabangan, Zambales.

I’m anxious. I’m excited. I’m going to be spending one week with a poor fisherfolk family.

I’m not doing this because I want to be known as a good boy. My volunteering to do this is genuine. Well, partly also because I want to do something I haven’t done before. I would like to interact with the people I am especially committed to serve as a Christian. It makes me feel good.

I’m not trying to sound goody with all these being a Christian and all that, though it sounds like it. I don’t know. I know the world mindset is that Chrisitan lifestyle is impractical therefore not worthy to be lived out. But no, I want to live a Christian lifestyle. It’s very ironic isn’t it. There are billions of Christians in the world yet the Christian lifestyle is an alternative to those billions. I grief at seeing the world lifestyle today is contradictory to Christ’s.

Uh, what am I talking about!

So, I’ll be leaving earl tomorrow morning for school. A seminar will be conducted to the volunteers and then, we’ll head off to Monumento to catch a bus to Zambales. And from there, our foster families will pick us up and bring us to their homes and from there, we’ll start living with them.

I’m really excited. I hope I don’t do anything wrong.

In any case, it’ll be hard to be disconnected from the computer, even from my cellphone, I’ll be entirely disconnected from my life for a week. That’s why I’m anxious. I still have problems I have to solve. I’m not sure if it’ll be all right to just leave my life with theose problems behind.

This past month has been very hectic. So much has happened. I don’t want to forget them. I promise myself to bring a notebook to Zambales and when I find time (I’m pretty sure I will), I will write down chronicles for the month of February and January. I haven’t written down A LOT of things. I don’t want to forget them.

Today, we had the continuation of our dramatic class recollection. It has now been an open book, the hidden recognition struggles between the different cliques in class. During our past recollections, my classmates all promised to work for class unity. We’ll all agree 100% that our sophomore year was a bad one. We did not function as a good class — as the best class we can be. And we all promised to work with respect for each other for the remaining two years we are going to spend with each other as classmates. High school’s supposed to be the best years of your life. And we have to live it with our classmates — all of them. Respect is the one thing we can’t practice to each other especially to those who come from a different genre of people or from a different clique or mindset. Ah, whatever, I don’t know.

I need to go now. I still have to pack my things. It’s past 10:30 PM and I still have to wake up by 4:30 to be able to get to school on time.

Bye. Until next week. Don’t worry, I’ll be uploading my written notebook entries once I get back home. That’ll be on Wednesday, hopefully (you see, come Thursday, we’ll be cruising for Palawan). Bye.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 8th, 2002 at 2:00 pm and is filed under High School, Social Babble . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.