THE upcoming celebration of the La Trinidad Tourism week on May 21-27, 2019 was institutionalized by the town’s local policy or as per Mun. Ordinance No. 36- 2018 (the La Trinidad Tourism Week Ordinance which should be celebrated every third week of May). The said tourism week celebration is inspired by Proclamation 894 of 1990 which encourages the holding of a tourism week to instill national consciousness on tourism as an instrument of progress towards an accelerated national development, unity and identity as a nation.
The town’s tourism week celebration is expected to create an opportunity for stakeholders to showcase their tourism potentials and to encourage more people to support the tourism development plan of the Municipality.
The set of activities primarily aims to instill tourism-consciousness to the community and likewise intends to attain the following objectives; assemble tourism stakeholders in a conference/meeting to discuss and draft future tourism actions; organize various activities that will promote the town’s tourism products, culture, and artistry, implement a tour guiding forum and familiarization visits to raise awareness and appreciation to the town’s different tourism assets.
At present, La Trinidad is only one of the few towns in the northern part of the country that invests and implements on these kinds of tourism activities. In time, and with the town’s sustained assistance and the community’s support, the Benguet capital town will definitely reach greater heights.
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The "Artekdote" and "Pimans of Baguio" pages, are certainly the two most popular Facebook pages in my social media newsfeed today. They say writing and reading is dead, but these modern digital platforms have revealed what is so genuine to humans – stories. Real life stories expressed by symbols, writings...they are the same humanistic formula of literature from centuries ago. With a grin, I can say that Literature is not dead...yet.
Literature as the art of written works was mainly invented to articulate the vague forms that exist in the ideal world of a writer, and at the same time, to imitate, in its most perfect form, the things that happen in his or her real world. Literature serves as a medium, and at the same time, a message; that, humans are designed to communicate, in short, to connect with other beings...to live – to affirm the human existence, to tell stories and leave them on the ground for others to read (and experience to an extent). We learn to live a meaningful life to leave a notable mark, personalized graffiti in the world that we will inescapably leave in due time; engraving our profile on our so called "society," and leaving trails to the younger seeds who will inherit the world – Legacy, as they call it.
Writing is, simply, an essential part of our lives.
Congratulations to the administrators of the "Artekdote" and "Pimans of Baguio"! You guys have achieved what some “elite-literature-societies” have failed to do: Encourage story-telling even among the “non-writers.”
The art is certainly not confined to the technical circles of self-declared intellectuals and philosophers. Story-telling is for everyone.