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| Here be Monday night's Quill crew: L-R: Sir Chito, Me, SPR, Ruth, Margie, Ta Nitz, Ms Miner, Bianca, Ate Ellen. This photo taken from Ms Margie's Facebook post. Thank you! |
Of course, last year, while dutifully checking lists and counting notebooks and cutting packaging tape and printing labels, we weren't even thinking about the Quill awards -- what we just wanted to do was, of course, just send out the 60 boxes to the 20 venues and just get this thing off the ground.
(But really, my choice moment, and I will never tire of retelling this: I found myself sitting in an Inquirer truck at 4 in the morning outside the domestic airport, waiting for a man I knew only by name, whose family was boarding a flight to Batanes. As we all know, that flight eventually got canceled -- I woke to a 9 am phone call telling me that, and I spent most of that day looking for another guy to take those boxes to Batanes, because, hey, it's From Batanes to Tawi-Tawi. Batanes was not an option, it was a requirement.)
It's been roughly a year since we pulled that off, with the help of hundreds of Inquirer employee-volunteers, partner organizations and of course the Inquirer bureaus. In last year's Post-Mortem, I wrote:
That said -- I wasn't kidding when I said many hands have kept us afloat -- what I've seen in the past few months while organizing this thing is something I'd never forget. I guess it's true what they say -- Build it and they will come.
They all did. And as they say, the rest is history.
At the time, I knew I was in the middle of something huge, and last Monday, when the team bagged an Award of Excellence at the Philippine Quill Awards, and was eventually named Overall Winner for Division 1 -- there are a few things that could rival the utter joy of that moment. More than the trophies and the photos and being on stage and all that -- it's the fact that the team was there to celebrate together that really got to me.
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| 2011 Philippine Quill OVERALL WINNER Division 1 - Communication Management 25 Simultaneous Inquirer Read-Along: Telling the Story to Empower, To Inspire from Batanes to Tawi-Tawi Philippine Daily Inquirer |
You know how they say that you're the sum of the people you spend the most time with? Well, how about this: Since 2007, I have been spending a ridiculous amount of time with the most creative and hardworking group that I have ever had the pleasure of working with, and as with all things that end up to be surprisingly amazing, it all started with a small idea.
(Rest under cut, with Photos!)
