Last year, Goducate published a book of articles by the children living at the Goducate Children’s Home in Cambodia. The pieces in “In The Shoes of a Cambodian Child” give an insight into what goes on in the minds and hearts of children from dysfunctional families and how their experiences have affected them.
This year Goducate will be producing a collection of articles by some of the needy children being served by Goducate in The Philippines. Unlike the children at the Goducate Children’s Home, the Filipino children are living in the community with their families, though not necessarily happy ones, nor their immediate ones. As is well known, many Filipinos go abroad to work, leaving their children behind in the care of others. Thus “In The Shoes of a Filipino Child” will also feature stories of emotional hardship as well as physical hardship. But there will also be stories of what makes them happy, and it is touching to read of what simple things are enough to bring them a little bit of joy in life. We hope that the stories by these children will create awareness among those who are comfortably off about how much poverty there is in the world around them.
For the coming book, a team from Goducate went to get photographs of the children who have contributed to the book. Our timing was bad. It rained very heavily nearly all of the three days that we were there. Manila was especially badly affected by one of the most serious floodings in decades, and there were 60 deaths from the rains reported while we were there. Although we were about an hour’s drive away from Manila, some of the villages and homes we had to visit were also flooded. Seeing people in their homes cooking a meal while standing more than ankle-deep in water as though it was the most natural thing to do made us realize how frequently they have to go through these hardships. However, at least they had electric lights at night, unlike those families relocated after their homes in Manila were destroyed by Typhoon Ondoy in 2009. Those families in the relocation area are still waiting for electricity, and one of the children has written of the hardship of not having any light to work by at night.
