Chosen Community: Barangay Lingunan
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Everyone has the right to voice out what they want and need to say no matter what their position in life. Just like the citizens, barangay officials also have issues seen around them that they want to address in the community.
I interviewed two barangay officials, Sangguniang Kabataan - Kagawad particularly, and asked them what issue they want to address in the community and their reason why they said this issue. The two issues that they have mentioned are:
1. Teenage Pregnancy
2. Lack of Youth Involvement
The first respondent said that teenage pregnancy is one of the issues they need to address in the community. The respondent stated that they noticed how the number of youth who are not returning to school have increased. They look for reasons why their data says this number and one of it is because of teenage pregnancy.
I can see that this issue came from one problem that led to another until all problems overlap with each other, because their main problem in this discussion is the Out-of-School Youth. They just knew the issue of teenage pregnancy due to the fact that they traced down the causes of OSY. They noticed here that there’s a lot of teens who have experienced unwanted pregnancy are looking for maternal care services. The respondent also assumed that this problem might be the root of poverty. Here, we can see how the problems met in the middle which are difficult to solve if they don't pay any attention to it immediately since one issue affects all.
In this case, the respondent focused and talked about how they want to address the issue of teenage pregnancy first. They want to give the youth full access to reproductive health services and they want to facilitate some seminars about the issue of teenage pregnancy. In this way, the youth can be informed about the problem which can help them to realize what will happen if this kind of issue is not prevented or avoided.
On the other hand, the second respondent said that the lack of youth involvement is also an issue they want to address in the community. They said that there were only few projects wherein youth showed some interest in, these projects are about tournaments and other games. Meaning, if the event does not sound that fun for the youth, only few will participate.
Moreover, the respondent said that the young citizens have no participation in the discussion of the future projects. There is no sharing of opinions and suggestions happening between the officials and the citizens. As a result, the young ones are just waiting for the entertaining events because most of them want competitions and not seminars or other programs that may be relevant to their lives.
As we analyze the presented arguments, we can infer that the both issues given by the two respondents are connected with each other. The first respondent pointed out that they want to address the issue of teenage pregnancy by conducting seminars about it. But, the second respondent explained that the youth has no interest in some seminars. So, what will happen to the issues that will be addressed using the provision of seminars?
In a nutshell, both the officials and citizens have lapses in this part. In this case, I believe that the officials need to plan a better solution on how to address such issues. Likewise, citizens, especially the youth, should appreciate the effort of their officials to combat the issues that may affect their lives. After all, we all have one goal at the end of the day and that is to resolve the issues that we want to be addressed.
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