Last week, Dr Leslie Tay, the well-known Singapore food-blogger who started the ieatishootipost.sg food-blog led a team of 11 from his blogging community to visit the literacy centers set up by Goducate for poor children in Sabah. They were accompanied by 4 friends from Nuffnang, Asia-Pacific’s first blog advertising community.
The ieatishootipost blog-community had earlier this year raised funds to purchase a vehicle for these poor children. MHC Asia (Singapore’s largest third party medical administrator) had matched a dollar for every dollar that ieatishootipost raised.
The blogging community, represented by these eleven, handed over a cheque for $22,000 (Singapore dollars) to Goducate for the purchase of the vehicle which will be used by the supervisors, teachers and students of Goducate’s literacy centers.
Due the shortage of time and the difficulty of reaching these centers, the team managed to see only 4 of the 7 Goducate literacy centers in Sabah. They had to take a boat and walk on rickety planks to reach one of the centers that was situated over a mangrove swamp. To visit another center that was 25 minutes walk from the road, they slipped and fell in the slippery mud and used banana leaves and car-mats as umbrellas. To visit another center that was in a swamp they sloshed through mud.
Needless to say, these dedicated foodies also enjoyed an amazing array of Sabah’s finest sea-food.
Their conclusion at the end of their short trip:
The food was excellent but the opportunity to see how Goducate’s simple education was changing the lives of these poor children was much better.
I’m sure that this will not be their last trip to encourage these poor children!
I’m confident that they will be challenging the other members of their large blogging community to be a part of Goducate’s dream of bringing literacy to the illiterate!