Faburada, Val Mercury M.

BSAc III Philo 102 G February 18, 2013

REFLECTION PAPER:

Work is one of the fundamental things we need to do and to have in order to live, to earn a living and to sustain us from the inevitable necessities we have in our life. Work gives us the opportunity and the way to earn money and to sustain ourselves to live and afford basic things we need in life. Essentially this is the focal idea of my reflection paper on what Ive experienced during the exchange student program experiences that appeals to my sensory capacity and my thoughts and feelings as a human being. Everything is anchored on the main idea of hard work to earn money, and the value of money. Hard work because it appeals to my experience of how hard is it to do a job that requires hard labor and extended effort, value of money because of the kind of labor and reality of doing things that are quite tiring and hard just to earn a living. In my two days of working in Perfect Pure, a water refilling station, I have experienced a lot of things that I have never had before. I have been exposed to the gist of the reality of life. During my stay there, I noticed three things that I have noticed in the features of the work and the entirety of the business. First is about the environment or the working place and the nature of the work. The place is quite big and with free space, the workers could work together in the place, one will remove the caps of water cylinders, the other will arrange the cylinders and slings, one will clean and rinse the cylinders and slings, and others will refill water and carry the finished product outside where it would be placed in the cars of the customers or any vehicle that they have. I find that the place is not a problem for us exchange students and Ive observed that it is quite accessible to the parking area where the customers are waiting; the nature of the work is another aspect that is interesting for me, interesting in the way that it gave me realizations and observations during my exchange there. I have noticed that the work is quite heavy and could be categorize in partition to a hard labor type of work. The reason being is that the business is service oriented, meaning that the workers need to unload the cylinders from the backseat of the customers cars and when it is done refilled with water then the workers need to carry it back to the backseat basically the customer need not to go down to their car, they only give the payment and wait for their water. I felt this is the hard part of the exchange because I am not used to carry heavy things, though I carry heavy things but not for 8 hours. Though I think its bad, but sometimes even there is a customer I let the others go to them because I am already tired and I sometimes felt muscle pains around my left arm; however amidst this situation, I have still done my job quite well, I have estimated that Ive served around 20 customers in that day . The second thing is the approach of the owners, to their workers. The owners are really good and approachable to their workers, it is like that the owners dont build a big gap between them and their workers. One instance is that, Ive never thought that even though they have quite number of workers at around 10, but the owners still go in the workplace and help, I know that it is normal for owners to do this but the work that they do is the same as the worker, like cleaning the water jars, refilling and even carry it to the cars of their customers. At first I thought that they would only go there to monitor their workers and checked the payments of the customers, but I was wrong as what I have experienced there. Further, the owners also treat their workers in a nice way, in fact I think that they are just like neighborhood friends because every break hours they would converse and have a little funny talk with their workers, even the son the owners would help in the working and would have funny conversation with their workers. However

amidst the good things as always there is a stain. I have observed something not nice, when one of the workers had committed a mistake by giving wrong water jar to a customer, the owner scolded the worker and I find ironic with the good relationship they have because the way the owner had scolded the worker is quite insulting saying in bisaya na ikaw, bungul pa ka, dayun pangit pa jud ka!, sunud ayuhi pud ug paminaw sa customer I dont know if this is just joke, but the voice of the owner and her manner of saying this was quite harsh and it is like in a personal way. Nevertheless, this was the only negative words Ive heard and witnessed from the owner. Personally based on their relationship, I realized that it is really hard to be working there as for my case, because I am the type of person that is not firm in terms of receiving negative words and sort of insulting words from other people, and another thing is that I realized that if I were not an exchange student and I am like them, maybe the owner would say the same way to me when I would do wrong things or commit mistake. But maybe I was just shocked by that situation because I never thought of that thing to happen, because of the relationship that the owners have with their workers. Third thing that caught my attention was the level of effort and the degree of labor that is required in their line of work. The degree of labor that they do is really in need of full effort and one should not be a sickly guy or a person who is very weak, because you need to carry gallons of water and move from one place to another frequently. Further that the workers and us need to refill about 50 -70 cylinders of water from their delivery truck, and that is for around 3 times in a day because they deliver 3-4 times in a day. What I realized here is that the level of monetary compensation that they receive for their work is quite not enough to breakeven or to compensate, however maybe because of the need for money and the difficulty and risk of finding another job then they just need to work for it. Though, maybe the owners do give them incentives and bonuses as form of acknowledgement for their hard work.