Five years ago, I offered to help Alex Yan with a website with the goal of helping his steering committee raise funds from advertisements. Alex and I have friends in Baguio’s Chinese community, which Alex Yan continues to mention in his conversations until now. That is how I knew way back then that this was feasible. Alex Yan ignored this proposition. After that meeting, I gave batch 97 access to the domain name including its hosting provider hoping that if Alex won't, the 97s might. Both Alex and the 97s did nothing about it for the next five years. It was left undone until the domain expired.

Recalling things from our last zoom meeting that Doc Ray Cornell chaired, Ruel Baylosis mentioned something about soliciting support through his brother who works at San Miguel Corporation. That was when I thought of reviving the website. Good thing is, that we now have a team who knows how useful this tool can be in pursuing our loftiest aspirations for the reunion.

Since the beginning of the year, we attempted to establish relationships where there were none, and deepen more with those whom we already have. Thanks to FB messenger. This year, however, when our plans for the reunion took off our daily chats became longer. In fact, it was so long that it gave us a problem scrolling up and down our group chat messages especially when we wanted to recall messages that contained dates, places, numbers, and references that we wanted to verify after so many days. Did you notice that the longer our exchanges became, the messenger, buries them just as quickly? Well, the website, on the contrary, never does this. In fact, our messages will remain until we delete them.

Most of all, this website is a must because we are attempting to raise half a million pesos for the Reunion’s Civic program. The fund will be used to purchase computers for a school that we will soon nominate. If we raise half of this it will still be good enough. We hope to do this by offering advertising space for $10 each (P500). We can reduce the labor cost if we sell the pages for P1000. Our batchmates can help us here. Brother Larry already came up with a letterhead we can use. Contrasting this proposition to the traditional one-scholar affair, these computers will benefit more students and for a longer time. When we hand over these computers to the principal of the school we nominated we hope to highlight this during our formal dinner event in Clark. We also intend to give the honor to Mr. Mayo, Mr. Mina, Ms. Yambao, and Mr. Ceniza to do. I feel that this will be uplifting and inspiring for them.

With regards to the website contents, there are, in fact, many topics it can cover. There are as many as the hourly itinerary details of the reunion that George listed down many times in the group chat. Because of this, we are inviting all our classmates to add their own materials.

This is your website. You own this. There is no limit to the pages we want to fill up. We will have opinion pages and many other categories that you think are good for the reunion. Your category suggestions will help us consider new and better horizons. Send them all to Roli Datuin for posting.

Larry’s work can be downloaded from there. Videos too can be linked from the articles.

The website is an interactive website. You can write comments after every blog.