A Helping Hand in the Middle of Covid 19 Crisis: Businesswoman proves Adversities aren’t Hindrances to Help Others in Need
Tourism is one of the many industries that were greatly hit by the pandemic’s economic blow. As COVID19 started to spread across the country, all kinds of travel have been banned under different levels of community quarantine, and until now, travel is still restricted. Travel agencies, consequently, suffered from this misfortune, along with the people relying on tourism as their source of income.
Ryan Flores, a businesswoman, is one with the countless others affected by the halting of travel and tourism industries. She and her husband Chester manage a travel agency, a business they have built and grown together for ten years.
“It’s tough. Most of our income is from this business. It’s very hard for us because we do not know when our business can resume, maybe next year or the other, we really don’t know,” explained Ryan.
The pandemic may have temporarily withheld Ryan from working on their business but it never held her back from helping those in need. Instead of being passive towards the changes and challenges brought to her life, she sought ways to be useful to her neighbors in Suntrust Shanata, a condominium community in Novaliches, Quezon City.
Ryan, with Liza Apura, both members of Shanata Community Development’s house committee, recently formed an online community where residents can sell their merchandise online. The main goal of this online platform is to give the residents, who lost sources of income, a new medium to earn money. At the same time, this also helps the homeowners have easier access to goods and essentials without leaving the safety of their community.
Ryan wishes for her community to be well-organized for the future of their children. “Shanata is our future. Time will come when our children will be the only ones living here. I want this community to be close-knit, where everyone is friends with one another. I don’t want our homeowners now to leave the community because they lost their jobs,” the 36-year-old mom shared.
Her natural sense of “malasakit” doesn’t look past the frontliners of her community who were the real heroes of their neighborhood. She initiated the relief good operations for Suntrust Shanata’s frontliners. Since the beginning of the Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ), the Flores family has been spreading kindness to the community’s frontliners.
“We cook home-made meals for them as often as we could. This is my way of saying ‘thank you’ to them. To be honest, words will never be enough to express how grateful we are. If not for them, a lot of us may be sick by now,” the homeowner expressed.
