My Philippines Adventure: Community Service with Brent School

On Saturday 2/1/08, I joined Tanya Liddle and others from Brent International School for a community service day that they had organized. There is a program ongoing in the Philippines (and other countries as well) called GK (Gawag Kalinga). Gawag Kalinga, meaning "giving care" is an integrated, sustainable, holistic program, which aims to address poverty in the Philippines by transforming and empowering poor communities through its various programs (http://www.gawadkalinga.org/). Through the GK program, there are communities all over the Philippines being built. On this day, we worked at the Rayville Treasure at Camp 4 off Kennon Road.

Rayville Treasure Village - Camp 4, Kennon Road

I was really excited to be a part of this day, because I have always enjoyed community service, and really want to get involved in the communities while I am in Baguio. This day was the 2nd day of 4 or 5 weekends that Brent was participating in. Our goals as a group for the day were to provide cooking lessons, paint the interior of the classroom, dig a composte pit, and level land for the playground. Being that it was hot out, and most of these tasks were manual labor, this was hard work. I personally helped with leveling the ground, and digging the composte pit. Without bulldozers or something of that sort, removing the dirt was quite the project. When we first started digging the pit, the ladies of the village seemed a little skeptical. After about 3 hours of Liz, Tanya, and I digging, the ladies could finally see that we were getting somewhere. They were so cute, and really into helping, that they started to kick us out when they felt it was their turn. Eventually, they completely took over. I think the most fulfilling part of the day was watching how the women bonded together to complete a project, both with the cooking lessons and the digging of the composte pit. Another fun part of the day was when Tanya started handing out candy that she had brought. When we first got there we only saw like 10 kids, but after the candy came out, I think there were like 30. They were coming from all over. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make it to the community service days, but I hope to get involved with more projects like this in the future.