Project PEARLS turned the weekly feeding program to a “Daily Soup Kitchen”. The aim is to provide healthy meals to the most malnourished kids and to ensure that they do not go to school with empty stomachs.
For children living in extreme poverty, breakfast can be their one and only meal. A meal that can define if they will survive or not.
This is the heartbreaking reality that Project PEARLS aims to change. Through our Feeding Programs, we want to provide a delicious and nutritious meal to children to help decrease the incidence of malnutrition. This is done everyday in Helping Land, a slum community in Tondo, Manila. Helping Land sits on an active dumpsite and is home to hundreds of families whose main source of livelihood is scavenging from garbage. Most of them fill their hunger by relying on “pagpag” – leftover food from restaurants scavenged from trash. In Filipino, “pagpag” literally means “to shake-off”, and this refers to shaking the dirt, maggots, and flies off the edible portion of the leftovers. Not only the children do not get the nutritional requirements they need, but they are also very prone to food-borne diseases which, often, can be fatal. (For more information about this, please visit this
article.)
We also have the Toy Library which we open for the kids after the feeding. More than just toys, this educational space serves as a tool in enhancing the child's creativity and imagination, and it creates meaningful social interactions.
We are in need of volunteers who can help us in setting up the feeding area, distributing the food, and supervising the children while they are playing. We welcome volunteers who love playing and interacting with kids!
Join us from Monday to Friday, 7:30 am to 9:30am.
Where to meet: SM Hypermarket, Radial Road 10, Brgy. 105, Tondo, at 7:30am (check the
map).
To volunteer, please contact Ardee at 0915-550-5855. Kindly mention that you got his number from IVolunteer website.
