The alarm beeps at 6 AM. “6 AM?”, I said. “I’m working from home! Why should I be waking up this early?” The voice behind my bedroom door replies. “Mangguna na ta!” (Let’s start weeding). The alarm beeped at 6 AM and that alarm was my mother forcing us out of our rooms to help her do the gardening.

Honestly speaking, I am not a morning person. If given time, I’d choose sleep. Now that almost everyone is working from home for the past weeks, I bet every bed person would be shouting, “Hallelujah”.

Empty chairs
Silent hallways
Clean office desks

These are what would come to greet you should you be able to walk past the strict security at the Visayas State University's main gate and visit the ATI RTC 8 office. From the usual office conundrum of whirring printers and glaring laptop and desktop monitors, the silence is something for the books. You can now hear the birds chirp!

All these belie the true nature of what ATI is actually doing.

Hi dear blog, sorry for not keeping you abreast for quite a while. That doesn’t mean of course that I forgot you, but, apologies for not giving you some sort of priority these past years.

Well, apologies too to readers that I started this blogpost a little bit of drama (hehehe). Just allow me please to say the least.

With or without COVID-19, this space was a part of my journal. Thanks to Agricultural Training Institute (ATI) for taking me as part of the bloggers.

Though, I only have a handful of entries here but those were experiences that touched my being.

Now that efforts of controlling (and curbing) the covid-19 pandemic is reinforced, we are at the mercy of being holed up at home and getting bored and more likely to suffer domestic ennui. For an introvert like me, this is the life!

Here, in the course of the community quarantine (with Metro Manila in a lockdown) are some of the simple things to do to be productive even if office operations and procedures were abated:

When Dr. Khin Mar Cho said last year that she will discuss and share with us what Nutrition Sensitive Agriculture (NSA) is all about, she never promised a date or a timeline in our previous conversations. She just did it the moment she had the window of opportunity to visit this side of the region again.

In his yellow polo shirt and khaki pants, James Fos Reamon welcomed us to Felicidad Orchard and Garden Organics with a look that was both expectant and apologetic, excited yet harried. He was just about to put the finishing touches in the newly built rooms, he said, which would later become our home for two nights when we visited in June 2019.