by Rafael Tupas

In all honesty, the team was pretty skeptical about the whole idea of the team building activity. Maybe blame it all on exasperation, or the fact that we wanted to go home after finishing the last of our major activities for the week. We also had concerns about the core group members, especially if they really had time to take off of their busy schedules just to come to the activity. Nevertheless, all of the members had to be a team players and not abandon each other and the farmers, so we stayed.

Preparations for the event weren’t too tedious for any of us. The games that were to be played were discussed the night before, with rules only left to be improved if need be. We just had to clean the room that we were going to use for the games, and prepare snacks for the rest of the core group members. In any case, it all went smoothly and we were sure that we could have a fun time and strengthen our relationship with the rest of the core group members.

The event itself was more fun than initially expected. There were only a handful of core group members present, including the President, Vice-President, Secretary, as well as the Zone leaders for each of the zones comprising Sitio Rero-an. We played games like Who’s that Pokemon? where we had to identify the person and their place of residence after a curtain drawn between 2 groups is dropped. There were a lot of funny moments during that game, lots of stuttering and lapses in memory due to the pressure. Another game we played was Pinoy Henyo, where we picked terms related to Sitio Rero-an and farming as the words that we needed to guess. A lot of passes were done in that game, mostly because our representatives were very nervous about trying to stay in one word because of the time limit.

After this game, we all took a break and had our snacks. Desperate for water, we concentrated on the watermelons, since there were many pieces that we had cut up from the fruit that we had purchased earlier that day. The team, as well as the core group members, all shared the food that we had prepared; watermelons, cheese sticks, bread with Nutella and sandwich spreads, as well as iced tea.

Once snacks were finished, we went into discussing plans for the sustainability of our project. We ended up discussing with them the list of crops that they were cultivating in the Sitio, and we took it upon ourselves to search for possible products that could be made from the listed crops or vegetables.

The activity was a success. Not only did we all enjoy the games that we played, but we strengthened the camaraderie between our team and the core group members. We also started work on developing our sustainability plan, which would save us from more troubles later down the road.