Philippines Outreach

 Philippines Outreach

Grace Hyunjoo Lee

The members of Ecosave Club have been helping those in need in the Philippines in collaboration with Open Hands for many years. To list a few of the activities, we have been sponsoring children with no legal status so that they can obtain birth certificates and be registered as lawful citizens of the Philippines.  We also have been helping provide water kits to families who do not have access to clean water so that they can drink clean filtered water.  When the trip to the Philippines was confirmed with travel restrictions lifted, all 5 of us got excited that we could finally meet and interact with those in the Philippines.
The first place of visit for the outreach was Bay Town in Antipolo city. When we arrived there, many of the children were gathered in the open area and greeted us. Contrary to my imagination, the kids seemed to have positive energy. A few of the children even approached us and held out their hands, meaning they perceive us as respectable people. Taking this hand and holding it up to their forehead symbolizes sharing our luck with them. Through small acts like this, I learned that the children had a positive image of us and this made me want to leave a good impression of us and to try to understand them as well.

When I looked around the open area we met the children, I realized it was surrounded by a concrete structure with grids, which looked like a giant beehive. The structure was a cemetery with some rooms blocked and the rest open; the enclosed ones had corpses inside. The whole village were living next to the cemetery and the children were playing right in front of the dead bodies. During the rainy season, the water would fill up to 3 or 4 stories of the cemetery and when the water level comes down, water that filled the enclosed rooms and the corpses inside would flow out and children would play in the puddle of the water.
We walked around the village and found that most of the houses were very small and were built with wood panels and plastic tarps and I could imagine water dripping into the house when it rains. We visited 3 families to listen to their stories and to see how they are using water kits. Since the houses were very small, there was not enough space for all 5 of us to comfortably move, and it was very hot in the house with not enough ventilation. When I heard these houses weren’t the worst of them, I was shocked and understood how difficult their lives must be. All 3 of the families we visited said the water kits were very useful and it looked like they were diligently maintaining the kits for clean water. Some questions we asked about the difficulty they suffered from triggered emotional responses from the ladies, and it angered me that resources were not distributed equally amongst the social classes during the pandemic.
The contrast between the children’s moods and their quality of life struck me to realize how much happiness they can find from the little things they have while many of us are dissatisfied with abundance we possess.

Through this entire outreach experience, including Bay Town and the Cherryl school, I was able to connect deeply with the people here and understand their living circumstances much more. Directly communicating with the people who had been watching my educational videos was really exciting and motivated me for the next activities I will be doing with Ecosave!