Keep Calm and Help Mitigate Climate-Related Issues!

***by: Shellie Tannagan (cannot access the invite to write 😦 )

Our group was assigned to the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice, otherwise known as PMCJ. When we had our first meeting in the office, it seemed so informal since it was just a small house. During our first meeting, we had an orientation with Ma’am Zaira Baniaga, who introduced us to the internship program of PMCJ. Initially, three teams were assigned to the said NGO, but since the office was too small to accommodate us all, we were assigned shiftings in which we were given two hours each group to be present in the office. Our group had the morning shift, 10am – 12nn. Also, during this first meeting, we were told that our hours will be based on the weight of task we would be given each week since two hours per week for the whole duration of our stay wouldn’t add up to forty hours. The teams were also given specific projects to focus on, and our team was assigned to Building Safe, Sustainable, and Resilient Communities (BSSRC).

Being under the BSSRC project introduced us to another mentor of ours, Sir Khevin Yu. With our initial meeting with him, we were immediately given tasks, rather, topics, that we would be researching on, since our internship was mainly to gather related research so as to solidify the data that PMCJ has, since the BSSRC project has not started yet.

Since our main purpose as interns was to research, our group proposed to have a “work from home” set up, considering some of us lived in Pateros and Taytay, and the office was in the Maginhawa area. Luckily, Tita Rose and our mentors approved of this, which made it less hassle for us.

Being able to search topics relating to climate-related issues opened my eyes to the reality that the Philippines is actually heavily-affected by these phenomenon. It made me realize that although totally eradicating these problems is impossible, there is so much to be done to be able to mitigate these climate-related problems.

Hopefully, these newly gained insights and knowledge of mine would not just be stocked up in my knowledge bank, but I hope it would push me to translate them into actions that will be able to help mitigate this situation in my own ways…