These 2 kids are examples of families that really need our help. The girl's name is Angel (and she is)....her parents have too many
kids because the mother's sister left her kids and went to Manila. The father is a day laborer and has trouble finding work in good
times. The mother is now doing our laundry to get some money - about $12/week (they rather work than get handouts!!! - even if we
pay more than the going rate). The boy's name is John Lloyd. His mother died giving birth to sibling twins. One of the twins died in
childbirth as well and the other is special - deaf and mute. The father left them soon after and the grandfather is caring for the 3
kids (John has older sibling). The grandfather drives a tricycle cab (motorcycle w/ sidecar), but there are not many people going downtown
these days w/o electric power on there.
Donation #2 - 12/01/2013
For Thanksgiving, we decided to send out complete meals to as many families as needed it. We settled on a number of 150 meals knowing that
we only had about 120 names. We were sure that we would find 30 more to feed on the night. Sunday night was determined to be the best night
because quite a lot of people search heavily for any work that they can scrape up during the week. Sunday is family day in the Philippines.
Thanksgiving is NOT a typical holiday here. We have, of course, introduced the new food group [Turkey] to the Philippines and most of the
people like it when we spit BBQ it like they do the pigs [lechon baboy] here. Now, turkey is way too expensive here to provide for 150 meals;
therefore, we settled on a combination. The menu we chose is:
1. Cooked White Rice (staple of all meals)
2. Pancit (noodles and veggies)
3. Fried Chicken
4. BBQ Pork
5. BBQ Turkey
We purchased a catered dinner of fried chicken, pancit and rice as a base, then added the bbq pork and turkey. Also, we got a 230 ml green
iced tea drink with that dinner. Shown below are the delivered bags of 150 of those catered meals. Next, there
is the start of the production line to cut up the bbq turkey and open the catered meals to add the pork and turkey. The 3rd photo shows
the catered meal. The 4th photo shows the cut-up pork and turkey to be added to the meal, and the last photo shows the completed meal
with the added turkey and pork.
This set of photos starts with another angle of the production line to add the meat to the catered meals. The 2nd photo shows the 150 ice tea drinks that
were served with the meals. The 3rd photo shows the crew finishing the last of the 150 meals. The last photo shows the leftovers of the bbq meats. Not
much left....
Once the meals were completed. We hand-delivered the meals to the people in their houses. We had managed to pull this off w/o anyone in the Barangay (village)
knowing what was going on. We achieved complete surprise. Needless to say, the MN contributions made all this possible and did not cost very much. We are now
working on the 3rd donation that will take place this next week.
Donation #3 - 12/20/2013
For the elementary school Christmas program, we decided to make a major contribution to help with this annual event. The local parents usually spend quite a bit on
this program for the children, but, of course, this year there is no money for this program. So..we decided to do the following:
1. Provide materials for Santa hats for all the students (100+)
2. Provide the food for the children for the program - fried chicken and rice
3. Provide cheap t-shirts for the kids (this is normal - the kids get most of their clothing from used clothes shops.)
4. Special good t-shirts for the kids through a raffle (the raffle was rigged to get the poorest kids all the good t-shirts).
5. Extra food for the families to take home for a good dinner for the entire family (bag of spaghetti and meat sauce - about 2kg).
6. AND, last but not least, we made a banner for the generous MN sponsors of the event.
The families start to gather for the program and you can see the kids are wearing their Santa hats:
Here are the classes in the Isagani Elementary School:
The 1st photo is the DayCare group, 2nd is the Kindergarten, 3rd is 1st grade, 4th is 2nd grade, 5th is 3rd grade. The 2nd row is 4th, 5th, and 6th grades.
Each group did a song and a dance number for the parents.
AND, then the Jollibee workers showed up to deliver the fried chicken and rice food for the kids. Each kid got an iced tea drink as well.
Jollibee is a local fast food place (like McDonald's) that the kids think is a terrific treat.
Then came the raffle for the special t-shirts. As you can see, the interest was quite high !!
After the raffle, we then handed out the handfuls of candy to any kid that could cart it away. It was quite humorous to see the littlies carry off
their "treasure."
This is the picture of the elementary school teachers with Jovie (they insisted).
AND, finally:
