Something about Uwanderer

Greetings of Light and Peace to all

This is my first time setting foot in read.cash. I am truly excited to be part of this amazing community and inspiring platform. Before I start, please allow me to introduce myself the simplest way I can. My real name is Renato and it stands for:

R - Resourceful

E - Energetic

N - Nice

A - Attentive 

T - Tough

O - Optimistic

I describe myself as Resourceful for the reason I have dealt with numerous hardships and difficulties in life to name a few, I have survived several natural calamities such as severe typhoons, flash-floods, burning houses, and earthquake shaken neighborhood.

Coming from a poverty-stricken family. It molded me to become an inventive and practical kind of person to survive on daily basis to provide a humble meal to my family. At a younger age, I have been engaged in various hard labor work such as shoeshine boy, candy and cigarette peddler, carwash boy, dishwasher, and many others. Those struggling moments of my life made me creative and Resourceful to overcome those challenging days. 

I define myself as Energetic because I came from an impoverished family who barely have enough meals in the table. With this at hand, I must stand up and cheerfully uplift the family from this depressing state. As the eldest of the family, I desire to make my family feel better, make them laugh, and feel joyful. To make this happen, I often do silly things to make them wear a smile on their faces and crack some jokes to hear them laugh out loud to bring the vitality of the family soaring up high even though we are down and low. And this Energetic characteristics paved many doors of opportunity, particularly during those tough times.  

I narrate myself as Nice simply because I was raised by two loving and caring parents who molded me to be kind and taught me to treat all people from all walks of life to be handled with sensitivity and fairly. My parents and grandparents also intently instilled in my young mind and heart the value of protecting the environment we live in and manage them accordingly and appropriately with care, gentleness, and caution. Being Nice to all living things on earth is fulfilling and rewarding in many ways. 

I portray myself as Attentive, as mentioned earlier I came from a penniless family. And as the eldest son, I need to be perceptive to the needs of the family. I need to be watchful for opportunities to serve my family. I need to be observant of what possible ways I can help my parents in raising my siblings. The empty pocket imparted to me the idea of being alert to any possible chances to support my loved ones and pay close attention to alternatives that will uplift our previous situation. 

I depict myself as Tough for the reason I come across countless difficulties, challenges, hardship, rough times, brokenness. To give you a better view, I have undertaken severe poverty, brutally broke, empty tummy, malnutrition, poor health, numerous calamities both man-made and natural disaster, death of loved ones, traumatic incidents, nasty depression, and others. With this at hand, I came to a state to become stronger and tougher if the situation is beyond my control. 

Lastly, I see myself as Optimistic, During my younger days, my grandparents and parents infused in me the idea of seeing the positive side of every problem we are facing with. For this reason, it cultivated me, to perceive the goodness in every trial and shortcomings we are experiencing and dealing with. Just like what my father always said when I was young, "Worrying won't help or change the situation to become better. It would be helpful to accept things as they are and make the most of what we have instead of being chained and agonizing from it." This message carved a huge mark in my being, which help me become more Optimistic in life.  

Additional Information and details about myself. 

My colonial name is Renato. A pretty old name I think (Haha), coming from a 700 years Spanish colonial era. Renato is given to the firstborn son in the family as one of the traditions passed on several decades up until the early '90s. (A little trivia about my real name)

But I am commonly known in my Indigenous name as "Udan or Uwan in Cebuano dialect" or Rain in English context. I am half Spanish and half  Manobo-Tigwahanon (One of the seven pride tribes of Bukidnon, Mindanao). My screen is named Uwanderer. It depicts my Indigenous roots and being a wanderer who loves traveling. 

And speaking of traveling, I was given the opportunity to travel to several parts of the country and to name a few are the province of Bukidnon, Misamis Oriental, Misamis Occidental, Lanao del Norte and Lanao del Sur, Davao Oriental, Davao Occidental, Cebu, Negros, Leyte, Mindoro, and several parts in Luzon Island such as Aurora, Quezon province, Pampanga, and others. 

Traveling made my experiential learning soar high as it taught me about the different cultures, traditions, customary laws, rituals, and ways of living changed me into a more mature, responsible, sensitive, understanding, empathic, and flexible person. 

The opportunity to travel is an eye-opener and life-changing experience. It widens my thoughts, viewpoint, perception, and perspective about life. Traveling also awakens its siblings named adventure. Traveling introduce me to outdoor adventure that made me fall inlove with adrenaline rush activities such as mountaineering, mountain climbing, trekking, hiking, rock, and wall climbing, water rafting, kayaking, board paddling, caving, spelunking, snorkeling, free diving, and other adventure related activities. For this reason, some of his relatives and childhood friends describe me as outdoor fanatics as my inclination runs toward it. 

To give you a better scope of me do see the photos below.

Traveling and adventure won't be complete and satisfying if I can't capture the moment. To enable me to encapsulate the feeling and experience coming from it. I was introduce to Photography. I instantly fell in love with it. 

Photography for me is not just digital arts and capturing the moment. Doing photography made me feel at peace, in solitude at that specific moment, and the feeling of fulfillment. Photography for me is also connecting with nature and the environment where I am at. In Photography, not only I discovered many things about myself but also the people around me. Photography gave birth to many opportunities for me to visit different places, and also impart to others about the places I have been with. 

What I mentioned above is a fraction of me. What really seized my heart is the call for serving humanity, wildlife, and mother nature. 

As foretold above I came from a destitute family and I know the feeling of helplessness, vulnerability, and pain. Knowing this kind of feeling reminds me of how difficult, challenging, hard, uncomfortable, upsetting, and heart-breaking from such situation. My deep understanding of this kind of feeling lead me to become a full-fledged volunteer, mobile teacher, and community worker doing community and volunteer service. 

I have been a volunteer to various organizations both local and international. Been expose to supplementing feeding, relief operation, safe space teaching, youth, and adult empowerment session, rescue response, and safety drill. Up until now, I am a reserve and standby volunteer, providing assistance and support from the mandate of the operation and organization I am affiliated with. 

The strong desire to help and support more individuals lead me to work as a Humanitarian worker. As a service provider, I was able to address and provided support and/or assistance to several needs of numerous groups such as fisher-folks, farmers, laborers, poverty-stricken urban poor, calamity affected areas particularly the internally displaced person, single parents center, persons with disabilities center, elderly center, correctional and rehabilitation center, children orphanage, a rescue center for girls and women, precincts, and indigenous people in line with the mission, vision, and goals of the organization I was previously and currently affiliated with. As humanitarian worker's we provided professional and holistic programs, projects, activities, workshops, and training to strengthen the capacity of each group and safeguarding the sustainability of the assistance and support given to them, to ensure the longevity of the aid given to the community and individuals.

This strong yearning to help others didn't only stop as a humanitarian worker but escalated to as a community volunteer teacher for the indigenous people and their community. As community volunteer teachers, our goal and responsibility are to provide literacy and numeracy knowledge to our minority brethren. In the indigenous community, we are not just teachers, we are also so-called nurses nurturing the needs of the children, youth, and adults alike. We are also so-called doctors who assisted the ill and sickly children and adult to the nearest village health center (three towering mountains, six ridges, and four hip-high rivers) and avail the basic health services with our referral (they are severely discriminated against low landers or city folks because of their appearance and being uneducated), we are also somewhat mediators to foreign conflicts that are beyond their traditional justice system. We are also slightly called negotiators to lowlanders who are doing unequal trading and improper agricultural exchange. Being a community volunteer teacher is more than just a teacher. It's beyond what is expected. Yes, it's draining and stressful but all those exhaustion will be filled with joy and happiness seeing them learning, developing, and improving themselves. 

Lastly, I am also a peacebuilder who desired to achieve sustainable peace particularly in the land of Mindanao where I came from. The land of Mindanao already suffered so many arm-conflict and killed a thousand lives many years ago and up until now. As a peacebuilder, I advocate conflict sensitivity to each community we serve. We endorse peace-promoting methods, approaches, and practices to prevent the escalation of violence and war. As a peacebuilder, we also mainstream the value of social healing, conflict transformation, and restorative justice to all levels of the community. This kind of work is not easy and your life is always at risk of various threats, coercion, and hazards. I know this is not a walk in the park kind of work but the desire and eagerness to unite the broken relationship between Christians, Muslim (Moro), and Indigenous people lamented my commitment to end the division and bring them together and co-exist without the idea of harming and inflicting damage to one another. 

Thank you for the patience in reading my introduction. If you wish to learn more about my work, or you might have a lot of question's in mind, or some striking points you wish to have a clarifications. Please hit the comment box and drop your message. 

I would also like to promote my steemit account, just click the link here https://steemit.com/@uwanderer for other inputs and insights about my work and engagements

I would also invite everyone to visit my noise account https://noise.cash/u/uwanderer777 for additional information about what I do and other details.

As a beginner in this platform, I wish to seek the guidance of my fellow read.cash writers to kindly guide me along the way for me to easily get acquainted with this amazing platform and also build a friendship with everyone. 

Thank you so much. Blessings to you. Stay safe and healthy.