DAVAO CITY – The coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic has impacted on the lives and lifestyles of every Filipino, rich or poor, young or old those living in gated subdivisions and in the ghettos, in palaces and shanties.
If anyone thinks it’s only the Filipinos who suffer and endure he or she is absolutely wrong. The major economies all over the world are down and barely surviving.
Millions have lost their jobs and means of livelihood. In the Philippines, the government had spent and is spending still, billions of pesos in social amelioration funds to feed the poor, to ferry home stranded OFWs and in setting up hundreds of infirmaries to augment what used to be the adequate number of hospital beds, in purchasing personal protective equipment and other gears including testing sets and masks.
It is true that Filipinos are resilient and are survivalists. Not a few however are dependent on government dole-outs. For the industrious moreover, the crisis created new opportunities and added income.
In many sidestreets in Davao City, ambulant vendors had surfaced selling varieties of fruits and vegetables, fresh milk, shrimps, fish, lobsters and crabs.
Restaurants are maybe closed but then shifted to home delivery. Enterprising employees augment their income by selling all sorts of home-made products from an assortment of cakes, ready to eat food - name it you have it, kimchi, etcetera, etcetera.
Among those making a windfall, in terms of tips alone, are the delivery boys.
So brisk is the business that some individual producer-sellers, have bonded together in order to meet increasing demands.
ON+LINE ORDERS is a group, now numbering 122, organized by Jovito Cadigal, which is into fruits and vegetables. Individually and several they sell their products to all sorts of markets and clients online.
Where a member receives big volumes of pomelos, durians, and vegetables they merely post their requirements on their ON+LINE ORDERS site and voila the needs are met.
Call it an underground economy, but for a country, in a survival mode, this is less burden to the government.
A bank employee and to the members of O’LORD this is a decent means of income that they are proud of. Besides, any which way you look at it, they help not only themselves and their family but also the government. (PNA)
