Survey...
In all honesty, I was not really looking forward in conducting this survey. One reason for that is because I’m not really used to interact with people much older than me. Because of that, I was a bit nervous and uncomfortable. Another reason is because I just don’t really go out that much. In my free time, I’d rather stay at home, rest, and have quality time with my family than go outside and do things that you usually do outside. I find it more fun to just chill and relax at home. But, because of this task, I knew I had to try my best to be somewhat sociable and outgoing, for I have at least four or five subjects at stake for this! But also because of this experience, I was also able to realize a lot of things.
In conducting the survey, I personally thought that it would really be easy since we only had to ask few questions to the homeowners. The questions being really easy too added strength to my assumption. Because of those, I was really confident that we would be able to accomplish this task fast enough, and that we would be one of the pairs to finish early. That was what I thought until we started interviewing the homeowners.
On our first house, I and my partner Shane Baral were warmly accommodated by the person we interviewed. She was friendly and kind to us, so I thought it would be a smooth flow. But the bad luck started when we went to our second house, because since then, we mostly got rejected by the people there. The following houses that we also went through were vacant, or there was no one at home that time. Yes, there might be many houses in our street (Oceanside), but during the day the people living there were mostly at work. That was what the guard told us, by the way. We met him while he was roaming around the street and asked us what we were doing. He was kind enough to tell us that information, and for telling us that we should go until the end of the street.
As we continued, I think there were three people who rejected us, all of them were housemaids. For a strange reason, all their explanations were similar! They all said that they were just new and have only been working there for two weeks, which were really unusual. We also encountered one that cannot speak Tagalog well. I think she is Bisaya because of the way she speaks. She was really trying hard, though unfortunately, we really cannot understand each other so we just said thank you and moved on. We also interviewed one who rejected us at first, but agreed the second time. When we went to the house in front of him, I think he felt guilty so he called us and now agreed to answer the survey which was funny.
Overall, I cannot say that I enjoyed this activity, but it was a really helpful experience for us to be ready in the near future. I think the factors that made this activity more difficult to accomplish were the fact that it was too hot during the time we conducted it. Another is because most of the people during that time were maybe at work or asleep, so they were not able to accommodate us. But still, after conducting this survey, it felt really good knowing that we accomplished what was assigned to us. I realized that we cannot expect all people to be approachable and friendly. All of us are different in our own unique way, so we just have to live with that and adapt with that.