Token feeding

Just recently, I was at the Malitam Elementary School to help at a feeding program that the Shell Tabangao Ladies Circle (STLC) was conducting in partnership with the school and its parents-teachers' association.

Our group arrived to find the feeding venue empty.  It was a far cry from last year’s feeding program with another school when we’d get to the venue and find parent-volunteers in the last stages of cooking the food, and already prepping up the area for the kids.

No parent or teacher came forward. Our school contact, who heads the canteen beside the feeding venue, did not even emerge from the canteen to say hi. 

Marie, our coordinator, said Juliet, the parent-volunteer, had decided to cook the food in her home since we could use the canteen’s stove only when canteen personnel were done cooking food for sale and wrapping up operations. This was a problem because by the time we got to use the stove and finish cooking, the break would have been long over and the children back in their classrooms.

Now that parent-volunteers (from left) Ana and Juliet
have provided the hose and regulator, they can
use our newly-purchased burner.

During discussions prior to the launch of the feeding program, we had been told that the school had another stove. We found out during our first feeding session that it was no longer working. We bought a burner, only to be told that they also did not have a regulator and a hose. 

We were just glad that Juliet had taken matters into her hands and decided to do the cooking in her home. Or rather, outside her home – a small shanty her family was renting at the back of the school.

Juliet's munggo is not only delicious,
but also filling and nutritious.

It was not an ideal place for cooking. We found her cooking away under a coconut tree, with the food exposed to all elements, including an open canal and pet animals nearby. We were thankful to Juliet, nonetheless.

It was also not convenient since she and Ana, another parent-volunteer, had to carry the heavy casserole full of cooked food to the school some 200 meters away.

Ana and Juliet carry this heavy casserole
of munggo some 200 meters to the school.

The duo had more carrying to do. Fellow parent-volunteer Jessie had cooked the rice in her home, so off Juliet and Ana went. They came back lugging a pot of rice between them. 

We started setting the dishes full of food on the tables when I saw Juliet leave the room with the list of beneficiaries. I learned that since the feeding started, Juliet had taken it upon herself to get the beneficiaries to attend by going classroom to classroom to announce that the food was ready.

It was too much for me. In feeding programs past, the teachers had always taken this simple, but very crucial task of reminding the beneficiaries in their classrooms to proceed to the feeding venue during the break.

I had this feeling that in agreeing to and providing a venue for the feeding program, school officials felt they had done their part. Everything else was up to us. Never mind if 61 of their students were fed; never mind if the DepEd had mandated the conduct of school-based feeding programs to help achieve one of the UN Millennium Development Goals: enhancement of the health and education status of children; never mind if the school actually scored performance points for partnering with a private entity to conduct a feeding program for its severely wasted students.

We asked to see the principal. She was not around. She had not been to any of the sessions, I was told. Tita Ellen, one of our members who is an educator and former Libjo Elementary School principal, had to go to her office and persuade her to attend the opening program last August 3.

Look! No more rice!

The principal had not shown interest in the feeding program so neither did her teachers. It’s a pity. They would have seen how the kids wiped a pot of rice clean, how they came back for seconds and even thirds, how the parent-volunteers worked so hard to make the feeding sessions happen.

A feeding session takes about an hour if all the kids come on time, maybe two if they don't.

If the principal and her teachers can find the time, they should drop by the feeding venue even for a few minutes so that they, too, can share the kids and the parents’ energy and enthusiasm and realize that they can do more than their token participation so far.