By Millie L. Kilayko

We started the website www.negrosfornoy-mar.com as we began to kick-off our campaign for Noy and Mar. The site became available online for the world to see just after we finished up our celebration of  Noynoy’s birthday on February 8 and opened up the Heroes’ Headquarters – Negros Occidental’s first Noy-Mar Volunteer Center. Today, after finishing up our celebration of Mar’s May 13 birthday, we prepare this website to say good-bye.  Good night, actually, because we will still be online until February next year so you may continue to view our Noy-Mar campaign history, but it will cease to be interactive.

In the past three months of our common cause to bring Noy and Mar to the nation’s two highest posts in our quest for a nation with a new moral order, we have made new friends, reconnected with old ones, and recharged with our everyday friends.  I’d like to think (and we will work at making sure it will be so) that disconnections with old friends because we wore different colors these past three months, were all temporary.

I started writing this piece with names of people who have began to bore an imprint in my mind – not because they have worked harder for Noy and Mar than everyone else – but because, simply, their stories just keep coming back into my mind.  Then I erased all of them because I decided I should be fair, and that, if I could not write everyone’s names, I shouldn’t even write one name at all. But now I have decided to write them in back again because this is my piece, it is from my heart, and what the heck…I’m entitled to speak from my heart.  It’s been a three month-long exercise of “trying to be fair to everyone, trying to give equal credit to all, trying to give balanced mileage to each group” and today, as we have closed the doors of the Heroes Headquarters…I will speak as myself and not as someone who sits from the Volunteers’ Desk.

Don’t get me wrong…I would still like to give credit to thousands and thousands who sweated it out for Noy and Mar in countless ways, and I take my hats off to all of them – those I have seen and those I haven’t.  After all, we Negrenses gave Noynoy 644,574 votes and Mar, our Kasimanwa, 706,897 votes.  Each person who worked towards getting those votes for them, protected their votes and writing their names is equally important.

But in this final piece, I allow myself the privilege of asking a few people who have become special to me…to take a bow.  Here goes…

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With the rise in the number of volunteers, the heroes HQ turned out to be too small for all of us. It was a blessing indeed to have a second home – Chicken House North of Joe and Pat Cajili. They gave instant permission for us to use their space for meetings and briefings that we couldn’t contain in our hq space. With arms outstretched, they even lent us their van , their truck and all other resources. And of course, a lot of inasals on the side. Thank you Joe and Pat.

Latest count from the Aquino Roxas Bantay Balota provincial command center as of 6:00 p.m., May 12, 2010:

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With only about 10 per cent of the votes still to be uploaded to the quick count center, one pattern is emerging: People Power in Negros Occidental overrode political and economic interests  to help deliver the votes for Noynoy Aquino and Mar Roxas.

This was apparent in the results of the fourth and fifth districts, where the tandem won overwhelmingly despite these being the bailiwicks of politicians who supported their opponents.

In the fourth district,  a landslide of votes  carried Noy and Mar to victory, even in La Carlota, hometown of  pro-Villar incumbent congressman Jeffrey Ferrer and his wife, Juliet, who ran unopposed for mayor.

Ferrer had, earlier in the campaign, announced 80 per cent of his district will go for Villar.

In  the 6^th district, the area of Lakas-Kampi provincial chair Gov. Isidro Zayco, the Liberal Party standard bearers also drew the same waves of votes.

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