What change would make to your hometown?
Teenagers nowadays live in an environment that is exposed to high technology. This includes the prevalent access to the Internet, the use of special gadgets such as the cellular phone, palm top computers, electrical organizers, and the like, all of which makes communicating with each other so much easier. Aside from this, youngsters like to hang out in clubs where they can dance the night away and listen to the their favorite music being played by a live band. This is the missing link in my hometown province, Balayan, Batangas.
Though Batangas is just a four-hour drive away from the capital city of the Philippines, which is Manila, it is still considered a far province. With that, the technology and the places where young people like could hang out are very scant. Being a province where the culture is very much tight and conservative, the old natives of the land do not like their children being influenced by what they connote as “urban living.” They would still like to have the peacefulness and the early ways of girls being timid, shy and quiet type and boys being courteous and gentlemen in nature. Therefore, any deviation from these norms would appear to them as major acts of disrespect, whereby it would reach a point that elder people disgrace and disown any of their younger relatives who try to lead a life likened to that of city people. I think open-mindedness should solve this problem. It is just a matter of acceptance that it is not really too bad and that it does have some benefits as well.
Take for instance, going to clubs and parties develops camaraderie and meeting people increases ones circle of friends. No man is an island. One will never know that the person he may meet today would help him out in the future. With this, I think a nice club with a live band, nice food and drinks would be a place to be for teenagers to hang out every night. As a compromise, it should not open until the wee hours of the morning, so the elders would not see it as so much as detriment to their children. Putting up Internet cafes would also be good. Having Internet connections helps province-based people to keep abreast with current events in the city or even international news. In this manner, they would not get bored. They would have a lot of topics to surf about in the Internet. Mobile telecommunication companies could also extend their services into to far-off provinces in order for every cellular phone to have a signal wherever a user may be. Loss of signal in certain places hinders teens from going to the provinces since they know they will have a hard time with communication.
Overall, it all boils down to two things-fun and entertainment. A certain place, which is not only limited to my hometown, should develop itself into becoming more appealing to the youth of today by bringing in things that could keep up with their level of thinking, with the way they do things and counteract their very short attention span.
