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A very strange year

It's been a year of many things for me, and while usually an introduction like that carries with it a very strong aura of foreboding (!), this post is one of thankful reminiscing, where we go down the (fairly recent) memory lane of when yours truly was part of the presidential campaign of one Mdme. Leni Robredo.


It all started innocuously enough. A friend whom I often collaborated with during elections messaged me out of the blue, asking me if I was interested in working for the Leni campaign. I wasn't very convinced with Leni at the time - Isko hadn't outed himself as a tool yet, and Ping was still performing decently on surveys - but the experience was going to be something that I knew wouldn't come along that often, so I decided to take it.

I started out as a writer, and the challenges of covering Leni during a pandemic lockdown dictated that the news cycle was a little bit different. We relied a lot on mobile communications for speaking with persons of interest for our stories (not exactly that unusual but we would have had an office unit if things weren't under lockdown at the time), and while we did eventually have an HQ, we specifically wouldn't be using that office up until late December, when the LK HQ became a center for relief efforts for Typhoon Odette.

During the relief drive, we were transitioned into a writing and documentation team. We covered and, at times, coordinated, the delivery of the relief goods from the HQ to the different ports within Metro Manila, and in some cases, east Luzon. One of the most frustrating experiences I had during the campaign, in fact, was when I was deputized as the coordinating officer of a delivery of grains and water to a seaport to the east. It was quite an affair that deserves a post all on its own, and I ended up being on the road from 4pm to past midnight, and to this day I find it amazing that we were able to pull that shipment off.

Just before the campaign proper started, we were again reshuffled and I was placed at the helm of the transcribers who worked on all of the speeches Leni had in a day. I'd like to think that we did a pretty decent job here, since we were essentially churning out at least four transcripts in a day to at most ten, depending on how busy her day was. Due to the fact that there was always some event every day, we were working pretty much seven days a week, so we were pretty busy all throughout, and the expectations were pretty high.

A lot of the best memories I have from that experience involve dealing with the people within my team - some of the best individuals I have ever worked with thus far. The work ethic and personal capabilities of every individual we worked with in the team was really amazing, and while there were plenty of tensions brought about by the very nature of the campaign, we were very effective and successful despite all of it.

We all know that Leni didn't win the campaign due to whatever reason - reserving my thoughts on that to myself - but given the amount of time we had to do what we needed to do, and how much prep time the campaign in general had to get everything ready, we gave everybody else a pretty good fight. And while the year from October 2021 to today was marred with plenty of oddities and strangeness that stemmed from the fact that I was part of that campaign (hence the post title), I will always be proud of my experience in that team, and I will hold the memories that stemmed from it very close to my heart. 

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