It’s more than a year now since the pandemic struck the world and brought us back home…figuratively and literally.
In our country with the longest lockdown in the entire world, we are back to where we started a year ago – enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) in the entire Metro Manila and some nearby provinces. We are seeing record-high daily reported infections as there are now 4 confirmed variants in the country.
We are back to where we started a year ago…
But just like any crisis, there are opportunities that surface and one of these is the emergence of community markets to bring goods and services closer to the consumers so that there is no more need for residents to leave their homes for essential items. With the plea to “stay home” and supermarkets having long lines with limited customers allowed at a time, more and more have opted to buy online but given add-on delivery fees, community markets have become the better alternative.
Subdivisions cafes, restaurants, grocery stores are now offering take-out, pick-up and delivery options and condominium residents found a business outlet right in their own buildings selling various stuff to fellow condo dwellers.
Our village is a fine example of this community economic bubble. We are a community with a little over 130 households and yet the range of offerings is just so interestingly good: from fruits & vegetables; to seafoods and packed dishes; cookies, breads, ice cream and home-cooked snacks – the entrepreneurial juices of the neighbourhood really came out during this pandemic. There are even medicines and PPEs as well as medical tele-consult with neighbour doctors offering their professional services so there is no need to go to over-capacity hospitals. It gave all of us a sense of security knowing that we have doctors a few minutes away.
And the best thing? We got to know each other! It took the pandemic to get our homeowners association to finally get organised after years of failed attempts. Since it was lockdown, homeowners were forced to be home so we got quorums during our general assemblies and with almost all stuck at home, we realised what needs to be done in our village and everyone became more engaged in village concerns.
Out of the crisis, another amazing thing happened…we gained new friends in the neighbourhood and what used to be just a wave and hi-hello became getting-to-know conversations and for the first time in almost a decade of living in the village, we were invited in our neighbors’ homes and we invited them to ours. That’s what I call a silver lining!
Take it from Bing 