A message to the next generation about the current

situation-global pandemic

Dear children, the year 2020 is the worst year I’ve ever met. It has a lot of tragedy happened
that made the people’s life changed that really far from before. When Covid19 roaming all over the
world, many have changed; affective jobs, many structures operation and other people’s livelihood
are temporarily shut down and stopped. The world seems like to stop because of the terrific
pandemic that we are still fighting today.
Following the government policy has turned our lives upside down because as we imagine our
lives today is definitely not easy as we try to look over our situation that we have fighting and
sacrificing for, we have been struggling to find ways to tolerate stay at home orders. To learn new
routines which are so different doings compare before within our social isolation and for many to
incorporate the education of the students during the day while schools remain closed. Covid19
Pandemic destroys everything. Life, dreams, plans, and even future. Worries and doubts are the two
words that bothered my mind every night. And sometimes I asked GOD why he let this kind of
disease ruined us? Why he let his children suffers? And why he let his people died? But I know that
everything happens for a reason and I believe in God’s plan.
Our sorrows run especially deep as we experience the reality of death or the struggling for
survival of friends or family members as a result of this disease worldwide. We see and experience so
much suffering on many levels for so many people. We have lost jobs. Jobs that sustained our family
just disappeared literally as the Philippine Government proposed total lockdown in order to curtail the
spread of the virus. And through this experience we have come to realize a deep sense of gratitude
for those who are continuing the frontline battle against this disease. Those doctors and nurses, all
hospital workers, police officers, who are putting their lives on the line to save others.
And for all those who continue to leave their homes each day, endearing their own health, to keep us
feed and sustained with life and essential things, all doing their part to help us endure and survive
within our new isolated realities.
There is something that we can all learn and carry with us through and beyond this
experience. We have experienced the frustration that comes from being stuck in our home. Our
economy is dying, it’s slowly going down. The government can’t promise to supply us with our needs
if this pandemic will last long like an obsessed clown. Sad to say, it will result to a total economy
shutdown. Feeling lonely, like a house in the middle of the hill but we will stay forever inside to avoid
getting ill because everything was scary to the invisible enemy will do everything so that life can be
saved. Loneliness and social distancing as circles of friends get smaller or disappear completely due
to death.
It is definitely not easy to adapt this new normal because everything has changed. The
education has been disrupted, food uncertainties, unemployment, and the worst is increasing the
number of deaths. I am worried to the next generation on what will happen next? I know that what
we are facing right now is just the entrance of the big changes for the coming years. Changes that
are fast approaching that will ruin everything and you need to be prepared and part of them because
what we are facing right now is because of the PEOPLE in which we are capable to handle this
situation though we never wanted it to happen because what we did will really reflect us. We should
all hope that our politicians will step up to this important responsibility. But we cannot rely just on
them. We also need to do more help just for the sake of the next generation in which they are the
hope of our nation to stand a better chance of overcoming the real threat of declining living
standards. To the next generation, doing good things are really matter at all in which fear will not
have the last word, but love and hope will. In behalf of this Pandemic that we are facing hardly these
days, we strongly need to continue to pray for all caregivers that God will bless their heroic efforts
with his peace and love. We heal as one!
Power and Politics: A reflection on political
settlement
By Michael Walls, on 11 April 2016

To many – perhaps more today than in some generations past – ‘politics’ is a dirty word. Yet the
political permeates our social lives on the most personal of levels as well as more generally. And the
twin sibling of politics is power; specifically it’s exercise and pursuit. Perhaps the thing that most
upsets many of us about ‘politics’ is what we perceive as the naked or covert use of power for
personal betterment. But there’s a complication there. As much as we tend to presume that
unbalanced power is a bad thing, the reality is that the stability of human societies through history
and around the globe rests on just such imbalances. And personal interest occupies an uneasy yet
always central motivator in the exercise of that power.

In some ways, it is hard to even conceive of power in terms other than in some unbalanced sense.
After all, if one person possesses the ability to compel someone else to do something, then that
represents an imbalance in itself. There’d be no compulsion if the person compelled didn’t accept the
authority of the other. Which highlights the difficult balance we need to try and find as human
societies if we are to balance some sense of social justice with the sort of systemic efficacy we must
aspire to if our states are to be run with reasonable efficiency.The idea of the ‘political settlement’
that lies behind this project encourages examination of the nature of those balances in the political
realm.
But we can also think of power in different ways. The sense of power as an imbalance in which one
person can compel another, which I’ve just described, is what Andrea Cornwall and John Gaventa
called ‘power over’. But we also sometimes think of power in different terms. For example, the power
to do something is usually more about the capacity we have to act, and we sometimes also talk
about ‘inner’ strength; the power we gain from within ourselves. Not quite the same as the capacity
to do something because it refers more to strength of character or resolve, but that can connect with
capacity as well. There is also a sense of power that labour unions, amongst others, have often used:
the power of unity or solidarity. The power we gain by working together with others of like mind.

The ‘Political Settlement in Somaliland ‘ research project is designed to dig deeper into some of the
attitudes that women and men have to each other’s political engagement, and to find out more about
how those attitudes are reflected in the ‘political settlement’ that underpins what has become an
enduring peace in Somaliland. In so doing, we will be thinking hard about how different kinds of
power are exercised by women and men in Somaliland: both in the negotiations, debates and
decisions that form the political settlement, and in the actions people take or have taken in an effort
to influence those decisions.

It is axiomatic that one of the most persistently asymmetrical balances of power is where it relates to
the roles of men and women in a society. A growing body of research has focused on Somali state-
building, and particularly on Somaliland, and there have been a number of studies on gender roles in
that context. We are aiming to explore the ideas at the intersection of those concerns by trying to
understand more about the assumptions and positions that shape social relations for men and
women. That links strongly to a number of specific areas, including violence against women and girls,
which seems to have worsened even while stability has been consolidated.

We are still in the relatively early days of the research, and are currently collecting primary data.
There’ll be numerous updates of one sort or another. Keep an eye on the research microsite for new
material
A SAMPLE CRITICAL ESSAY ON
HEMINGWAY’S “THE SUN ALSO RISES”
14 JUNE 2018 RICHARD NORDQUIST

In this short  critical essay (roughly 1,000 words) about Ernest Hemingway‘s novel The Sun Also
Rises (titled  Fiesta  in Great Britain), the author demonstrates how minor  characters shed light on
some of the conflicts experienced by the protagonist, Jake Barnes. The title of the essay offers
an  allusion to the last line of John Milton’s sonnet “On His Blindness”: “They also serve who only
stand and wait.” Notice that the essay is based on a close reading  of the novel and doesn’t rely
on  secondary sources.

“They Also Serve . . .”: The Waiter in The Sun Also Rises
A Sample Critical Essay on a Novel
by Richard Nordquist

To keep Jake Barnes drunk, fed, clean, mobile, and distracted in The Sun Also Rises, Ernest
Hemingway employs a large retinue of minor functionaries: maids, cab drivers, bartenders, porters,
tailors, bootblacks, barbers, policemen, and one village idiot. But of all the retainers seen working
quietly in the background of the novel, the most familiar figure by far is the waiter. In cafés from
Paris to Madrid, from one sunrise to the next, over two dozen waiters deliver drinks and relay
messages to Barnes and his compatriots. As frequently in attendance and as indistinguishable from
one another as they are, these various waiters seem to merge into a single emblematic figure as the
novel progresses. A detached observer of human vanity, this figure does more than serve food and
drink: he serves to illuminate the character of Jake Barnes.
On a number of occasions, Jakes expresses a sympathetic awareness of the waiters around him. For
instance, after dining with Brett and the count at the restaurant in the Bois, Jake recognizes that the
two waiters standing by the door “wanted to go home” (61). Likewise, on the French train crowded
with pilgrims, Jake discourages Bill from teasing the overworked waiter, saying, “No. He’s too tired”
(88). It is fitting that Jake should identify, at least implicitly, with waiters. Like them, he is a reticent
and passive observer, carrying out routines with emotional detachment. For the waiters, of course,
such detachment is merely professional decorum. For Jake, however, emotional detachment is a
means of protection, a method for coping with life.

One way that Jake maintains his composure is to substitute objective observations for emotional
responses. His ritualistic descriptions of waiters doing their work often serves this purpose, as in the
conclusion to the scene in the Bar Milano. Ignoring the warnings of Montoya, Jake has set Brett up
with Pedro Romero:

When I came back and looked in the café, twenty minutes later, Brett and Romero were gone.
The coffee-glasses and our three empty cognac-glasses were on the table. A waiter came with a
cloth and picked up the glasses and mopped off the table. (187)

By focusing on this image of cleansing and reordering–of a waiter clearing up the mess made by
others–Jake displaces whatever feelings of remorse, shame, and envy he may have.
On occasion, however, a waiter may be seen to dramatize rather than displace Jake’s feelings. After
leaving the Bar Milano, Jake goes to the Café Suizo, where he is knocked out cold by Robert Cohn.
After being revived, he again offers a parting view: “I looked back at them and at the empty tables.
There was a waiter sitting at one of the tables with his head in his hands” (192). As an image of
weariness, this is hardly unusual: it’s late and the waiter is tired. But the image of head in hands may
suggest something more, particularly as observed by a man whose own head is “a little wobbly”
(192). It may be seen as a tableau dramatizing Jake’s own exhaustion, pain, shame, and despair.
For the most part, waiters function silently throughout the novel as disinterested witnesses, emblems
of routine maintenance, and correlatives to Jake Barnes and his suppressed emotions. In one
important scene, however, immediately following the death of Vincente Girones, a waiter steps out of
his conventional role, sits down beside Jake at the table, and offers this choric commentary: “A big
horn wound. All for fun. Just for fun. . . . That’s it. All for fun. Fun, you understand. . . . Right
through the back. A cornada right through the back. For fun–you understand. . . . You hear? Muerto.
Dead” (197-98). It is not just the repetition and the echo of “cornada” in this speech that recall the
prayer of the older waiter in Hemingway’s short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” More
significantly, it is the weary but forceful note of human concern in the face of human absurdity that
links the two waiters. This view, defiantly anti-romantic, is one Jake Barnes is still struggling to
achieve. When asked by the waiter what he thinks of all this “fun,” Jake can say only, “I don’t know”
(197).

Appropriately, then, it is again a waiter who signals a possible change in Jake’s life. The last part of
the novel opens with another image of cleansing, waiters “sweeping the streets and sprinkling them
with a hose” (227). And it is a waiter’s actions that dramatize the end of the fiesta:

A waiter wearing a blue apron came out with a bucket of water and a cloth, and commenced to
tear down the notices, pulling the paper off in strips and washing and rubbing away the paper that
stuck to the stone. The fiesta was over. (227)

The vigorous verbs in this description reflect Jake’s determination that certain things in his life were
over, that he had reached “the end of the line” (239), that he was “through with fiestas for awhile”
(232). Perhaps he had learned something about friendship, about “valuable qualities,” something
waiters had always understood (233).

In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway has countered the lost generation of main characters with the
emblematic figure of the waiter, whose voice is as old as the book of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities,
saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity” ( The Holy Bible Eccles. 1:2). The wisdom gained
by the waiter through disinterested observations of human folly may lead to the strength that can
help him endure. We should remember, after all, that the novel’s single representative of moral valor,
Pedro Romero, “learned his English as a waiter in Gib” (242).
Personal essay:

My Family
By: Jhel Reshel C. Telin

Each one of us living in this world has their own family because it is the basic unit of our
society and we can’t stand without this. Family is a group of two or more people that are related
by blood, marriage, adaption, step or fostering, and who usually live together in the same
household. But behind this, we can’t deny the there are lots of incomplete family or what we
called as “Broken Family”. It is a family that has split due to a variety of reasons. This leads to
a children being raised by single parent, step parents or others not related to the biological
parents. The breakup of a family has many negative impacts on the children. And I am one of
them who experienced this kind of complicated situation.

When my family was broken, I felt so sad and emotional. I didn’t know what I am going to
do on that time because our perfect family was easily broken and I can’t believe it. It was too
early that I can experience this, because I am not contented enough with their love and care
that they showed to me, that’s why my life becomes miserable. Almost every day I cried
because I can’t accept the reality. God is so unfair of all people had a family my family had he
chose to broke?

When I saw the family of my friends and classmates that enjoyed having fun together, to
be honest, I can’t stop my tears from falling because I remembered again my family if they
would not be separated, I am very much sure that they might be like them. I am very much
envying for those who have a complete family because I am deeply surfeit of this situation. I
want to taste what is the feeling of having a complete family, even though in just only a one day
but it could not be happen anymore.

My family is the source of my happiness and inspiration for all the things, but they had
gone in my arms, they left me. When there are problems and trials that come in my life, I need
my family so much to comfort me, but my parents were separated and they can’t make what I
really want to fix about them because I know there is no love remains in their hearts.

But God has mercy. I can’t believe that I got the warm love and care from my beloved
grandparents. They showed me what is the real love that wouldn’t gave my parents to me. They
built me on what I am now today, they supported me, reminded to keep fighting and never lose
hope coz life must go on and they fulfilled what are those shortcomings in my parents. I am very
much thankful to them because my life seems like working again of all the variety of problems
and challenges that I’ve experienced, I’m still here and keep fighting. Thank you so much lord.
Even though you gave me this kind of situation, you still find a special way to get the best people
that are deserves to change their positions. You still there to guide and light my darkest way
that I have been taken. So, now I know! And I do believe that everything happens for a reason.

I was wrong. Instead of irritating to our almighty God, we should be thankful to him and
we would not be reproaching him to all the plans that he made for our lives. Everything will
exists in this wonderful world has main goals and purposes.
 PARADISE

I still can’t wrap my mind around seven thousand islands. Incredible! Of course.

Overwhelming history, captivating beaches, natural resources,

And smiling people with mystic charm,

Filipino Novels, poems, books, songs, traditions, beliefs,

and culture capture the uniqueness of the country

It widens the imaginations of how beautiful,

And peculiar it is. And yes it’s through Literature!

Drinking excites and stirs up the gears of unprecedented thoughts.

The thoughts that shape up bringing new life and motivation,

Permanently awe-inspiring, and sparking,

Adjective words that bring trademarks to the country,

Absolutely it’s a delightful PHILIPPINES!