Ecosave Philippines Outreach 2025

Written by: Hyunseok Elliott Lee

Last week, our Ecosave members took part in our annual outreach trip to the Philippines. We took time to travel to several towns in Manila and the surrounding areas, interacting with the children and residents of each area, some of whom we were seeing for the first time.

Upon our arrival, we first travelled to the area of Tondo, one of the districts of Manila. While Tondo is the most populated of the Manila districts, boasting a population of 650,000, it also holds some of the most impoverished sights within the entire country. Often referred to as the biggest slum in the country, Tondo suffers dire conditions, with the staggering majority of its residents suffering from severe poverty. The area is also subject to extreme crime rates and lack of basic services such as sanitation and electricity.

However, although the area was portrayed as rather miserable and harsh, the people were extremely welcoming and warm, making our visit much more interesting and comfortable. We were able to talk to a shop owner and volunteer for OpenHands’ birth certificate initiatives, who navigated us through daily life in her area. We were informed that most of Tondo was recently devastated by a large fire last November, which cut out access to electricity. We were enamored by her optimism and continuous efforts to care for others, even in the face of such extreme adversity. We initially came to Tondo to get a scope of the conditions in the area, but our talks with her, as well as our overall experience there, has inspired us to come back to provide direct aid to the children there sooner or later.

That same day, we also travelled down south to a town called Cavite City. Cavite, a seaside town, has a distinct area of stilt houses built on top of the coasts and seas. This area has also often been viewed as an impoverished area with the structures being built very dangerously and unmonitored. The visit, though brief, gave us a glimpse of the different types of slum housing in the country, and also allowed us to investigate the arising problems unique to those specific areas. We learned of the dangers around the geographical challenges that the area faced, such as children falling under the cracks of the stilt houses and drowning, as well as houses collapsing. It was still refreshing, however, to interact with groups of children who had come out to greet us. A similar sense of optimism echoed between the children of Cavite and the people from Tondo, which came to us as a beautiful representation of the strength that keeps us going, but also a call for help, help that we could perhaps rise up to provide.

We spent the last day visiting Tanza 1, an area that our current members had become quite familiar with. We visited the “Little Hands Daycare Center” and decided to hold a unique education activity for them: a lesson on dental care and brushing teeth. We prepared a couple of sets of plastic teeth and brushes for the children to try for themselves, and went through a thorough explanation process, with the assistance of our OpenHands volunteers, who served as translators of sorts throughout.

After that, we had time to bond with everybody, with some of us reuniting with kids we saw on previous visits. We made sure to take photos with our instant film cameras, which has become a tradition of sorts now. We concluded our visit with giving away meals that we had prepared from Jolibees, which has always been widely popular with both kids and parents.

 Once again, we made sure no one left without anything in their hands. As we can only reach the Philippines for limited amounts of time every year, we always make it our mission to maximize our work when we’re actually around. Hopefully, the optimism that fuels the lives of the people we help every day can be passed onto us and our efforts to support them.