I'm not going to deny that I've seen a lot of amazing things, DONE a lot of amazing things, and met a lot of amazing people over the past month. But today has really been the day I've been waiting for since October, when I first read about Efren Penaflorida and the Dynamic Teen Company--and when I was selected to be a GSE Team member--and when "F" was named the 2009 CNN Hero of the Year.
You don't really know what to expect after such a lengthy buildup. After all, fame and renown has been known to do funny things even to the most well-intentioned person. But I had high hopes; after meeting 2008 Hero Liz McCartney in December and finding her to be a passionate but unassuming indivdual still devoted to her cause, I had no reason to expect disappointment.
And indeed, I was not disappointed.
The hardest part of the day was the drive--even though today was Maundy Thursday, the roads to Cavite City were packed. Folks were taking advantage of the half-day to get done whatever needing doing, since everything would be closed on Friday. Lea and her husband Max picked me up at 9am, then picked up Baby who would accompany us - but I think we didn't get to Cavite until close to 11am.
The second hardest part of the day was actually finding the DTC office--we drove right past it without even noticing it. We'd find out the reason for the subtlety later.
But we finally figured it out--and F was there on the sidewalk to greet us himself. We walked down a narrow alleyway and through a gate into the DTC "office" proper, where all the introductions were made. We then sat for an informal chat - obviously I knew some of the organization's history, but was interested in the inside details, and especially what's been going on since December's awards ceremony.
It turns out that all the credit for DTC has gone to F, but it really should be JB who gets the lion's share. JB was a college engineering professor who first realized his larger responsibility to the children of Cavite, especially those who were too afraid to go to school--afraid of being victimized by gangs. F was one of those children, and became one of JB's scholars, children who were given the support and strength necessary to complete their schooling.
From there, the DTC concept was born. The organization, comprised almost completely of teens, set out to do the same thing JB had started--give children the interest in education, and the strength to persevere even in the face of the threat represented by the gangs.
They realized it wasn't enough just to save kids who were being threatened by the gangs, drugs, prostitution, and the syndicates that round up helpless kids to further their nefarious ends; they had to find a way to take the legs out from under the gangs by cutting off the supply of helpless, ignorant children that was their lifeblood. Thus began the effort to bring the spark of education to the slum children of Cavite City. Armed first with backpacks, then pedicabs, and finally now the pushcart classroom, groups of 25 to 50 teens set out each week into the city to give children education, medical care, food--and above all, hope that they can indeed rise above the desperation of their situation. They now have a four-cart system: a literacy cart, a values education/canteen cart, a playcenter, and a medical/hygeine clinic. Every Saturday, these carts make the rounds through the city, and the children swarm to them like the proverbial flies to honey.
Of course, everyone wants to know what F did with the money ($100,000) he received as CNN Hero of the Year. The media has been as quick to tear him down as they were to build him up, accusing him of using it to throw parties, etc. The truth is a lot more humdrum, and a lot more telling of the political and social realities of our time. For starters, he owed 30% tax; then, his immediate desire was to give the entire amount over to the DTC--however, had he done so, he would have owed another 30% as a donation tax! Thankfully, F and JB had excellent legal advice; acting in accordance with that advice, F used the entire sum to purchase an empty plot of land upon which will be constructed a new learning center. At the moment, there are no funds to begin that construction, but the land itself is bought and paid for.
Additional funds are an interesting dilemma. Upon being named CNN Hero, F was deluged with sudden celebrity--overnight, he received some 15,000 emails. His Facebook account was overrrun. The DTC email address was similarly overwhelmed. Returning home, he was accorded every award and honor available, all the way up to the office of the President. Not surprisingly, that's pretty much where the support ended; DTC received a lot of promises from politicians--but this is an election year, after all, and politicians offer promises free of charge. DTC has resisted all efforts to engage them in the political debate; F and JB have refused to endorse any of the presidential candidates (they "have no color," referring to the fact that each of the 10 presidential campaigns is identifiable by a particular color--orange for Villar, yellow for Aquino, green for Gibo, red for Erap, etc.). JB said they were continuing their work "silently," as they have always done.
F was actually invited to be a panelist for a presidential Q&A; in addition to questions on their positions regarding education, he asked each of them to define what "heroism" meant to them--he wouldn't give names, but he said the responses were exactly what you would expect: the most popular candidates in the polls managed to turn their answers into something about themselves, while the least popular candidate actually gave a decent, honest, and forthright answer. Go figure.
The challenge now is whether or not to restructure the organization. There's certainly an advantage to becoming a large-scale nonprofit NGO--but one huge disadvantage. Until now, the DTC has been fully run by the teens, kids who have escaped the clutches of the gangs and are now working to protect others from the same troubled existence. They've made all the decisions, chosen the organization's direction, planned and executed all projects (sound familiar, Interacters? As we were talking, a young man, 16 years old, sat nearby. JB gestured to him and said, "Do you know what he's doing? Answering DTC email. That's what our teen volunteers do--everything around here. But under a new system, that might not be possible--everyone in the administrative end will have to be of legal age.") If F and JB go through with the paperwork, that will no longer be allowable under the government's terms--it will have to be adults providing the leadership. So what to do? If the next step is indeed to be taken, F and JB figure the best way to go about it is to set up a Board of Directors comprised of program alumni. Many have remained involved anyway; after graduating from the program, attending and graduating from college, their careers allow them to provide the funding by which the next generation of scholars are able to attend college. These are the people who know and understand how the DTC works, and why it has been so successful.
"The world is after the story." The past months have seen a steady stream of media outlets all looking to feed F's story into the ravening maw of their consumers. Film crews have been here to do a dramatized documentary of his life. It's easy to have all this excitement swirling around you, and forget what you're doing, and why--but F just laughs about it. It's a way to keep people interested in the DTC's work--to remind them of the need that still exists-but it clearly hasn't gone to his head.
Quite the opposite; there's more work than ever. Another young man in the organization--with a story similar to F's--is Emmanuel (Em for short). Growing up in the protection afforded by the DTC, he established his own sub-program: M.Y. Rights ("Mind Your Rights"). The intent was to target child abuse. F mentioned that child labor laws are routinely violated--children as young as 12 are frequently used to help local fishermen in the backbreaking labor of hauling in their long nets, and paid almost nothing, perhaps 5 pesos (today, the exchange rate is 45 pesos to the USD). But even that pales in comparison to the actual physical abuse--the violence--many children are forced to endure. Em created a program that started with educating children that they had rights--and that those rights included protection from such abuse. But that wasn't enough, so he added on parent sessions--using food as a lure--to educate the parents (many of whom were themselves the victims of abuse, and lacking any significant education to know better).
Things got really challenging when Em discovered that despite the education sessions, some parents continued to abuse their children. Without hesitation, he acted in the best interests of the children, and reported the offenders to the police. The abusive parents were arrested, tried, convicted and sent to jail. But eventually their terms were up, and out they came...and guess who they came looking for? When Em started receiving death threats from these people, the DTC acted to protect its own--they set up a safe house for him. He was there at the office today, continuing his work. He's planning to do pre-law in college (do you see the empowerment of youth here!), and eventually get a law degree to work as a human rights lawyer--but he thinks that might not really be where his life needs to go. He's asked JB and F to groom him-toughen him!--for a run in politics, to help improve a system sorely in need of his kind of integrity.
Perhaps now is where I should mention the offhanded reference JB made to another DTC member, now 11, who at the age of 8 was brought into the organization after he was discovered sleeping inside a tomb in the cemetery. That child created another sub-project called "Caring Children."
I've referred to the DTC space we were in as an office--but that's an inadequate word. It's everything: parking garage for the pushcarts, warehouse for donated and purchased supplies, safe house and sleeping quarters for any and all children who need it each and every night. JB gestured around the little alcove where we were seated. "Tonight," he said, "every available bit of ground will be covered with sleeping children."
I asked whether they had a "Big Brother" type of program--and indeed they do. They're called "Accountability Partners," older scholars in the program who partner one-on-one with younger, newer kids to give them mentoring, guidance, assistance, etc.
I guess I wasn't too surprised to discover that the DTC system works in many ways similar to what we're set up for Interact: the teen teams go out into the community every Saturday, and every Sunday they are in the DTC office for "upgrade" sessions, where they learn about or improve their skills in first aid, hygeine instruction, academic skills instruction--whatever they can do to be of greater help the next week.
Of course I wanted to know cost-wise how the pushcart program operated. The literacy cart is the most expensive, because it has 2 laptop computers. All together, that cart costs around 100,000 pesos (today, that would be around $2200). But that cart suffers the least in the way of attrition; the values cart also brings food for the kids, which obviously needs to be replenished each week. The clinic brings a supply of fresh, potable water--as well as basic first aid supplies which get used up quickly (remember many of these kids live in and scavenge through trash dumps). And the playcenter...well (this is the part that breaks your heart) most of these kids have never before had the opportunity to play--their lives have not been so kind. And those who have had the time have never owned toys--they've played with trash, whatever they could find. So JB and F could only smile and laugh when they said the toys disappear off the playcenter cart; who could blame the kids for not wanting to part with a toy, having only one day a week to play with it?
I asked whether other countries have contacted DTC about how to replicate the pushcart classroom--F said yes, absolutely--many areas in Africa, southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent have expressed interest. F has spent quite a bit of time abroad these past few months as an inspirational speaker on behalf of universal children's education (another reason the media has felt justified in criticizing him--"Look! he's using that CNN money to fund vacations!) The media also hounded him to know what plans he'd made to celebrate his birthday--it happened that the DTC decided that would be an appropriate day for the groundbreaking for the learning center. Naturally, the media wanted to know if the rich and famous would be invited, and F replied that those who had expressed interest in and support for the project would indeed be invited. F figures the media was expecting something similar to the circus that annual surrounds boxer Manny Pacquiao's birthday (you can imagine it, right? I don't need to describe it.) How disappointed they must have been when the groundbreaking failed to become a lavish red-carpet affair! When the post-event party was a simple affair back in the office!
Through it all, F and JB never lost those big grins. They are happy just doing what they know is right. Sure, it's an irritation and a distraction when the papers start speculating on F's love life--but it never seems to stop them from doing what needs doing. As we talked, teens began trickling in and getting to work--there had been a major fire in Cavite, and hundreds of slum dwellers had been displaced, including many children who had lost everything, including their prized possessions, their school supplies. The teens began counting out the number of backpacks they had, preparing to load them with brand new notebooks, pencils, boxes of crayons, etc., for distribution over the weekend. The DTC purchases most of the supplies--if stuff is donated, it always comes with some kind of sticker or label trumpeting whoever gave it (I promised not to tell what happens to the stuff donated by politicians).
Before I left, I gave them what I had brought: the $600 check from Interact that was the total raised by this year's puzzle project; This Is New Jersey, the coffee table book we brought as gifts for our host families as a donation to the eventual learning center; my NJ state pin, which I ceremonially pinned on F (only fair, since they gave me one of their DTC shirts--I'd have given them my Interact shirt, but I was wearing it at the time!); my contact card and my heartfelt promise that I as an individual and we as Interact (I hope I was not too bold in saying so) would continue to support their efforts in whatever way we could.
This is what I learned today: many people call themselves heroes. Few deserve that title. I met one of the true heroes today, and I should be lucky to be remembered in even a quarter of the terms that F and JB will be remembered. My life is more rich for having met them, and seen their work; I am inspired to carry on. There are a few folks back home who would benefit immeasurably from taking a trip to Cavite City if they wish to truly understand the value of education.
Here's to you, Kuya F!
Lew
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