THEY say that friends is the difference between a lonely life and lively one.
What are friends for? What can you count on them? How much weight can a friendship hold? These are questions that pointed to the very heart of friendship.
Friendship matters to a lot of women today. Rich relationships can produce enduring bonds through career, love, loss, marriage and divorces. Sharing matters about wrecked love affairs, accepting the wrong jobs, making decisions—stories from youth to nursing homes on an accumulation of both wisdom and lessons learned, which when shared makes friends stronger than they would have alone.
In some curious way, Vina Nacionales (President and founder of Friends) cannot remember who had the idea of Friends, or how somehow it came up.
The journey of Friends started with no safe ground from which you can pronounce and expand. Now that they rarely make a move without each other’s listening ear or opinion. They anchor each other on the idea that a friend has only your best interests at heart.
They collaborate, instigate and change their positions on social issues, and the collective endeavors they do for others. They are ethical leaders with global perspective and an unshakeable commitment to common good. They are women with disparate interests, some of them are patrons of the arts, some are forerunners of scholarships in education, some promote women empowerment assisting in Senior Programs, media needs, home health issues.
Vina Nacionales is the engine. They never run out of steam, as they are working on the same page, with parallel efforts and common goals, encouragement and patience, insights. They could count on each other, they refuse to be aggrieved. Sustaining rhythms, unfazed by challenges of the hallmark of Friends is the way they take care of each other.
For Vina, Friends began on a crisp fall night on Norwalk last weekend. Like drawn together by a strange spell, their expertise and current endeavors seemed to have blended and melted. They talked and exchanged ideas about their current, individual projects and the importance of their commitments and empathy, as well as insights of women overly responsible and disgustingly reliable, by their own self-deprecating humor.
Mrs. Mary Nene Maceda, one of the brightest lights in the porch of the civic community had immediately partnered with Vina, and the rest of the women from different tables that evening, gave the importance of a cheering section.
Newshen and incoming President of the PWU Alumni Association, Lydia V. Solis, spoke of education scholarships their club would be sponsoring, aside from their social, civic, even spiritual activities already calendared in their agenda for the years. PEDRO incoming President Dr. Manuel Baculi and wife Myrna, had tapped Friends in support of their Disaster programs.
The singing doctor of Fontana, Dr. Richard A. Gilkison, wife Lady and son Mark (Bagyo) Villamac-Ho joined forces with Friends to boost their on going VETERANS, “Let us not forget them!” endeavors.
Friends have rolled up to a great start, with charitable, philanthropic ventures, treating such gift of togetherness with respect.
