Category: Livelihood Training

The Goducate model farm in Laguna is being expanded by another 5000 sq meters. The existing farm has been fully planted with vegetables and there has been a need to expand the farm for some time.

The purpose of this farm is to help our workers to learn how to grow vegetables in small sustainable plots, so that they can then teach needy people to grow vegetables in their own backyard (or frontyard) plots in our Veg@table projects. The food produced on this farm also provides food for the full-time Goducate trainees who are being trained there and who live there.

The Veg@table projects in various poor communities have been slow to take off because of lack of water in these communities in the previous few month. Another limiting factor has been the lack of workers who are trained in this form of agriculture. This expansion will help solve this problem.

Two months ago Jonatan, our livelihood trainer, went to Talahiban to teach the villagers there how to make liquid soap. One of the villagers is now reaping the profits of this training.

Nanay Remy, a widow, used to go to the mountains to collect fallen coconuts, from which she would make copra, the dried meat, or kernel, of the coconut. She used to earn 50-70 pesos ($1.10-1.60) a day doing this. With the liquid soap she is now earning an additional 80-100 pesos a day. This has made it easier for her to support herself and her daughter, Mary Jane, a second-year high-school student and a clarinetist in the Goducate orchestra. Previously there used to be times when Mary Jane could not afford transport to school and had to make the 3 km journey on foot.

Nanay Remy believes that education for Mary Jane is vital to help them to survive. She was unable to give her older children, who now have their own families, a formal education.

Goducate recorder player Angelica Dacillo is a grade 6 student in elementary school. At the start of the school year her parents had a problem wondering whether they could afford to send all their 7 school-age children to school. We encouraged them to do so, and helped out by providing Angelica and her sister Christine with notebooks given by Goducate sponsors.

A week into the school term, the chairman of our barangay (village) called Angelica to tell her that she had been selected as a municipal government scholar. She had been selected by the Municipal Mayor Jose Padrid.

When Angelica went with her mother Melinda to the Municipal Mayor’s office to receive a certificate of scholarship (grade 6) for 1 year and a package of school supplies, the Mayor explained to Melinda how Angelica was selected. The Mayor had recalled that there was a group of children playing the recorder at the town’s Christmas celebration last year, and he identified Angelica from photographs of the event.

When they got home, Melinda asked Angelica what she would do with the school supplies, since she already had a set. Angelica said she would like to give them to fellow recorder player Mary Ann. Mary Ann had dropped out of school after the first week of term because she did not have the necessary books. Mary Ann cried with joy on receiving the books, and is now back at school.