A Grade 12 Pinay student Hillary Diane Andales from Tacloban Leyte, was the grand prize winner in Breakthrough Junior Challenge, an international science competition. Among the 11,000 competitors all over the world in 178 countries who joined, she bagged the 1st prize and brought home P20M including the reward of her teacher and school, and was granted a scholarship. The goal of the competition is to award intelligent students who can explain in layman’s terms the complicated things in science. In her entry “Relativity and the Equivalence of Reference Frames”, she explained in her creative and simple way the Theory of Relativity with the help of a cell phone and pick-up truck.
This young Pinay student together with her family was one of the Yolanda survivors, it was remembered that the storm wreaked havoc on her hometown in which lots of people lost their jobs, houses, and even the lives of their loved ones. They had to run up to their double-deck bed because they didn’t have a second floor and her dad punched the ceiling and held on to the steel trusses of the roof and stayed there for 7 hours until the storm surge subsided, she elaborated. Even after the great struggle against fate the people in Tacloban Leyte, never backed down from the challenges of life and this young Pinay continued to fight.
