Now in Filipino: For the Families Who Live Between Two Languages
We've added Filipino to Beacon. For families who live between languages and across an ocean, the message that matters most now arrives in the language it was felt in.
A lot of the people we build for live in more than one language, and often in more than one country. They work and sign papers in one language, and they love, worry, and pray in another. When the moment comes that a message truly matters, it belongs in the second one - the language of the kitchen and the phone call home, not the language of the paperwork.
Beacon is now available in Filipino.
Why language is part of keeping people safe
Beacon does one thing and holds it steady: it keeps a single message for a single person, checks in with you quietly, and delivers your words if the day comes that you can't send them yourself. For that to be worth anything, the message has to be understood - completely, and by the person you meant it for.
In a family where English is the second language, the most important words are exactly the ones that get lost first. Instructions get half-translated by whoever happens to be fluent. Elders are left to piece things together in a language that was never theirs. A tool that only speaks English quietly decides who in the family gets to be included, and who has to wait for someone to explain. Adding Filipino is our way of taking that decision back out of the tool's hands. When Beacon speaks your language, your message reaches the whole family - including the people who would have been left at the edge of the room.
For families spread across an ocean
For many Filipino families, the person the message is for isn't down the hall. They're in another time zone - a mother in the province, a sibling who stayed, a child who left. The distance is already part of the worry.
A message that has to cross that distance shouldn't also have to cross a language on the way. When you write in Filipino, the words arrive in the form the person will actually feel them - not a careful English approximation, but the way you'd have said it at the table if you were both in the same room. For a family that has spent years staying close across an ocean, that plainness is not a small thing.
What speaks Filipino now
The whole of Beacon. Every step of setting it up, every prompt and reminder, the check-ins that watch over your message - all of it, in Filipino. And your message itself is yours to write however you speak: in Filipino or Tagalog, in Taglish, in the mix that sounds like your own family. We translated the tool so it would get out of your way. We did not touch your words, and we never will.
The promise doesn't change
Everything that made Beacon Beacon is exactly as it was. Your message stays private and encrypted, held for the one person you chose, and sent only if you stop checking in. The steady hand behind it - the unglamorous work of staying up, staying careful, and being there on the day it's needed - is the same in every language. We simply made sure that steadiness is available to more of the people who need it, in the words they'd choose themselves.
Set up your beacon
It still takes only a few minutes: one person, one message, one schedule. Write the thing you'd most regret leaving unsaid - in the language you'd say it in - name the person who should hear it, and let Beacon watch over the rest. A message in safe hands, in your own language, is a quiet kind of relief. Everyone deserves it in the words they think in.
Sign up now: https://milkweed.foundation