The Rise of Mars

MARS is the name of our class in fourth year high school. For a long time my contact was only my best friend, Dondon, who stayed in Davao. Later, however, a friend in Washington DC found me in Friendster. Last summer, Dondon also arranged that I meet with one other former high school classmate. After some exchange of ideas we agreed to gather the rest of the guys for a reunion.

I created a Yahoo group for this purpose and we managed to enlist another. I was hoping to search all the social network sited in the internet (Multiply, Facebook, Friendster...) to find the rest. I also planned to visit their homes in Davao. Unfortunately I was not able to find time before summer break ended. Now that the semester's break is here, I renewed my plan.

I didn't have to do so much. One of the first members bumped into one of our batch mates while on a business trip in Makati. This guy happens to be in contact with several other guys. He gave me email addresses and cellphone numbers. The ripple effect has started... I was also contacted by another friend who found me in Friendster... Amazing!

I didn't know I can replicate what I did with my college batch. This group is now super organized with a monthly get-together and a system for communicating with each other. I'm now organizing a get-together this December for my high school batch. There are suggestions to include the other sections of the fourth year batch. It's going to be a lot of work but I guess it's worth a try.

What really prompted me to write this blog is an email I just received. It came from a classmate in grade school. He is now in the US. He tells me that he is in contact with several other classmates in grade school.... uh oh...

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I became the hinge for all these guys. Our family have stayed in the same house since I was in grade school. I also had the habit of bringing the whole class to our house for parties, sleepovers, or simply to hang out. Anyway, I better start organizing my search for grade school classmates as well... Good luck to me... =)