43 RD NUTRITION MONTH CELEBRATION

Kabankalan City, Negros Occidental, Negros Island Region

OFFICIAL CONTEST PIECE FOR ORATORICAL COMPETITION

ELEMENTARY CATEGORY

Written by Francis Romulo J. Moya

Creating a World Where Children’s Dreams Become Real

“Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.”

Distinguished judges, fellow orators, coaches, parents, ladies and gentlemen, those are words of
the famous Afro-American poet Langston Hughes.

Author of The Big Sea, considered an American classic, Hughes nurtured his wistful dream in his
writings – a dream that all is fair regardless of color. Like Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech,
hands down one of the greatest pieces of oratory in the world, a dream spoken eloquently in front of the
Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963. King held fast to his dream of equality for the
blacks. It was seemingly endless lobbying, and peaceful protests and marches. The brightest of the days
for racial fairness came with the election of Barack Obama, the black president of the United States highly
esteemed not only for his diplomatic international policies but also for his sparkling rhetoric. With Obama, a
black bird flew in the glory of everlasting sky! An inspiring reality! The dream did not die!

We Filipino children dream, too. We dream to fly to places higher than the clouds. A dream
encased in our hearts, never wanting it to die. But that dream would die when we are not healthy.

I wonder: Are severely malnourished children, those like weak brittle bones wrapped in parched
skin peppered with sores, still dream? Are their brains still capable of dreaming? Are those looking like
bloated bullfrogs about to burst at any unheralded minute still dream while strapped in hospital beds? It is
sad thinking that millions of children would never realize their dreams because they are nutritionally
unhealthy.

Due to unhealthy diet, children become hopeless birds, with broken wings, never can fly! And they
become wingless adults – unproductive citizens who are perennially sick. As the National Nutrition Council
or NNC has stressed, unhealthy diet is one of the common shared risk factors to obesity and non-
communicable diseases.

The World Health Organization and more than 700 researchers found that the number of obese
people has reached to 641 million in 2014. Is it alarming that our planet would collapse for it could no
longer hold the weight of millions of obese people? That does not push the red alarm button! What’s
alarming, with the magnitude of an impending holocaust, is this: Obesity and overweight in both children
and adults increase the prevalence of cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, cancers, and
musculoskeletal disorders. If unabated, death is inevitable!
 According to the NNC, three out of ten Filipino adults are overweight and obese. Meanwhile, the
prevalence of overweight among Filipino children ages zero to ten years old lurks in death-like patterns. It
shreds the fabric of our Republic into useless splinters even termites refuse to ingest! Overweight and
obesity are more than health risk factors to developing non-communicable diseases. They are messengers
of mortality! How then can overweight and obesity be prevented? No better measure than making healthy
diet and physical activity a life-long habit.

Obviously, my voice cannot reach all corners of our city, all zones of our country and all poles of the
world, but let me urge you to echo and re-echo this clarion call, reverberating in the abyss of conscientious
people’s hearts and minds, springing to life in people’s daily habit, creating a lifestyle that promises the
dawning of a new day – a new day of contentment and happiness for you and me!

Eating a healthy diet should be an integral part of our set of habits. We should be aware that a
healthy diet is the foundation of good health. If we consume variety and balanced meals that meet our
nutritional requirements and avoid foods high in fat, sugar and sodium, we can maintain a healthy weight
and reduce risks of developing non-communicable diseases. With a healthy diet, daily energy and
nutritional needs can be satisfied, ensuring optimal health.

Friends, a poet has said that God must be too busy that He made mothers His assistants in rearing
children. As God’s assistants mothers irrefutably know best. They should be reminded however to
breastfeed their babies. Exclusive breastfeeding during the first six months is sufficient to provide the
nutrient needs of the child for growth and development. From six months onward, complementary feeding,
together with breastfeeding, keep up with the child’s growing nutrient needs. These practices are globally
accepted as investment to a child’s future.

Fellow children, believe me, a healthy diet provides us strong wings to fly, as strong as wings of an
eagle, the emperor of the sky! A tapestry of wings spread all over our native land we are tasked to convert
into a true home of a noble race.

I am reminded of what an inspirational poet, Claudia Grandi, wrote – “Let every day be a dream we
can touch. Let every day be a love we can feel. Let every day be a reason to live.”

Friends, with healthy diet as our habit, we can always touch our dream and make it real; feel love,
allow it to bloom and share it; and enjoy life because it is beautiful and wonderfully worth living, so
reasonably inspiring, like flying over the rainbow, with our strong wings in the glowing color of hope, brighter
than the morning sunrise! With healthy diet as a habit, we can create a better world, even a universe –
where dreams, yours and mine, become real!
_______________________
About the Author

The author is an accomplished and award-winning journalist and literary writer. He is a recipient of the Arinday Literary
Awards for Short Story and for Poetry, the Arinday Journalism Awards for Editorial Writing and for Feature Writing, and the Focus
Philippines Poetry Prize. He also received the Quill Award for consistent quality writing as a student journalist from the School of
Communication, now College of Mass Communication, at Silliman University, where he was named Student of the Year during
his junior year.
Having undergone rigorous trainings from writers and book authors with international and national calibre, he won in
prestigious national and regional journalism competitions while still a student, and later as a professional journalist. He considers
Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas, his adviser in Silliman’s Honors Course Program who later became the program administrator of the
International Writing Program, University of Iowa, as an inspiring influence in pursuing a hallmark of excellence in his writings.
An editor of a weekly campus paper during his college days, he edited The Visayan Times (now defunct), the first
regional daily tabloid in Western Visayas, and was an editorial associate of The Visayan Daily Star.
Aside from having edited community papers and company organs and done editorial consultancy to numerous school
publications, he is a much-sought after editor and technical consultant of undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate
researchers. His edited papers have earned high marks from experts and meticulous panellists of universities in the country and
abroad.
He used to conduct seminars and workshops on campus journalism in many public and private schools in Negros
Occidental. Many among those who trained under him won in school press competitions.
A writer of prize-winning pieces for declamation, oration, poem interpretative reading, character presentation, story-
telling, binalaybay, verse choir, and other literary speaking genres, he has also coached winners in national, regional and
provincial essay writing, poetry writing, declamation and oratorical speaking competitions.
He offers summer classes on speech enhancement, public speaking and campus journalism. Many of his class
completers have won in scholastic, community-organized, national agency-sponsored and international organization-funded
competitions.
At the side, he took eight semesters of special piano lessons under Prof. Albert Faurot, international recitalist, lecturer
and choir conductor who authored books on arts and music used by many universities in the world. As a Faurot special student,
he joined piano majors in piano recitals. In one of those recitals, he and Prof. Faurot played Ralph Federer’s Rhapsody in D
Minor for Two Pianos. He was one of the pianists of the then much-travelled Silliman University Men’s Glee Club which Prof.
Faurot conducted. In 1978, he was among the three piano-accompanists during the glee club’s concert at the Cultural Center of
the Philippines. His four-semester special violin lessons were under Prof. Zoe Lopez of Silliman’s School of Music and Fine Arts,
now College of Performing Arts. According to him, his classical music training contributed to the attainment of elegance, grace
and fluidity in his literary writing craft.