Live Internet Chat with U.S. Embassy and Philippine Human Rights Experts to Discuss the 2005 Human Rights Report

Today, at 9:00 a.m., Commissioner Dominador N. Calamba II of the Philippine Commission on Human Rights, Dr. Alymei Simbulan, Executive Director of PhilRights, a Filipino human rights organization, along with the U.S. Embassy Political Officer are special guests of the live internet chat hosted by the U.S. Embassy’s Virtual Consulate Davao to discuss the U.S. governments’ 2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.

These reports cover internationally recognized individual, civil, political, and worker rights. The Philippine section of the report is available through the U.S. Embassy’s homepage at http://philippines.usembassy.gov. The text of the full report is available at www.state.gov.

Learning and Fun as ONE

Today is truly another day to be wonderful. So nice to attend a workshop that's very interesting and so many things to learn. There is a difference in today's activity because we get a chance to be working as a group, so fun! And one thing i like is we get the chance to post our name to what group and corresponding topic am I to get involved with. And that's democracy. The freedom to choose.

And this is the exciting part. We get to record our voices as a group to be podcast. First time I heard my voice, in a podcast and of course, loving it. Nothing wrong with it. Smile!

But comes the difficult part. I really have to familiarize and practice the steps or procedure in producing our own podcast. It takes time and patience to do specially we are out of time and we have to present it later for everybody to have a chance to listen and do critics on our podcast. But everything is worth it because we have a good view from Mr. Ronald Meinardus.

So this is the end of our two-day hands-on workshop. I hope we could have another session in the future to enhance this worshop into a higher level of blogging and bodcasting.

A wonderful day!

It's 5:30 pm and I am here at Friedrich Naumann Stiftung Foundation for a two-day hands-on workshop on Blogging and Podcasting. It all started with a welcome remarks from Mr. Ronald Meinardus of FNF. Right after, we introduced ourselves briefly to be able to familiarize each participants. Then followed by Mr. Manolo Quezon III, who discussed about "An overview of political blogging and podcasting in the Philippines".

After lunch, Mr. Abe Olendares (PinoyBlog) taught us the step by step tutorial for setting up your blog using www.blogger.com. This was the exciting part because we were able to apply what we have learned from the speakers.

Tomorrow will be another topic. Though it will our last day, I bet it will be another exciting day for all of us.

Welcome to my blog!

Greetings of peace and human rights! I am really out of words right now for i have no idea if people do love to search or discuss what "human rights" is all about. For some, reading or hearing this is just a mere two words that connote rights or whatever. Hmmm... But even animals do have rights, right? So why human rights? Well, i guess you asked the same. It is very obvious that today's society is full of many human rights abuses specially children and women around the world. Check out website www.hrw.org.

I often heard or read these violations through internet, newspapers, televisions, even the confessions of people who came to our office to ask for help, radios, etc. But why bother? There are agencies out there who extended help to these people who were violated of their rights.

But wait..If we speak up and say something about these abuses, that is the start of our concerns in human rights. By way of it, we can say that "human rights" is supreme to our lives which makes us human after all. That's it for now.