2010 Bacolod Mission Trip Jonathan Cheng & Jonathan Cheng Jr., December 5, 2010

What Is The Objective Or Goal?

✤ Our objective is to change some poor people’s living habits and help improve their lives so that they can come out of extreme poverty.

✤ We participated in a program called ‘VHL’ that was effective for the past years and is still running (see next slide).

✤ We are working with a Christian organization called International Care Ministries (ICM) to help people live a better life.

VHL:Values, Health, Livelihood

✤ VHL is a program to help the slum people get lifted out of poverty.

✤ Values is how to prioritize their life. For example: if you don’t have money, then what should you do? (Many people don’t care until it is too late).

✤ Health is Clinics that heal people with T.B., Malnutrition, etc. They also teach how to keep clean and healthy.

✤ Livelihood is teaching people how to earn small amounts of money on their own, like running a small convenience stand or selling their grown vegetables, to make some money.

What is ICM Trying to do?

✤ ICM is partnering with slum churches and their pastors to speak the word of God to the people and running the VHL program too.

✤ There are other programs like the ‘Uplift’ program (a shorter VHL), ‘Preschool+’ (getting kids into schools), Mercy programs (healing the sick).

✤ They have been working for years and are very successful. For this building program, they have built around 1500 houses in the slums and are aiming for double that in the next year.

What made them poor, why do they live like this, and how do they live?

✤ About 1/3 of the Philippines live on US$0.15 a day per person.

✤ They were the richest Asian country, but the government was quite bad, and didn’t know how to use the money, so they became poor.

✤ Once in poverty, it is very hard to get out.

✤ Many poor people now live in the slums because there is no money to buy even the resources to make a house, so they use sticks, bamboo and dirt.

How does a new house turn into a new home?

✤ The people help us build the houses they will live in, so they feel like they really earned the house, and it is a lot better than their old house, so it is their home not house.

✤ They feel more comfortable in it because they take pride in it, even though they are not the highest quality.

What difference did I make?

✤ We encouraged them by just being there, letting them know that they are being cared for, not just left and forgotten, like a lot of people do.

✤ We also help by spreading word of the program to others so more people can help.

What Did We Do There?

✤ We visited a lot of slums to have a feel about what we are trying to prevent and we also visited the place we built last time.

✤ The place now looks a lot better and the people are happy living in their houses.

✤ We started to fill the foundation with dirt so it is the right level for the floor to be placed, then we put cement on top of the dirt to make the floors. This took us two afternoons.

Dec 3, 2010

Who Went With Us?These are some of my friends that went with me. (One of them isn’t in the picture.) The adults aren’t in the picture either.

Dec 3, 2010

Who Lead Us On The Trip?This is my friend’s dad. He is the one who invited everyone.

Flooding

✤ When this slum floods, all this dirty water comes up into people’s houses, causing disease and bacteria.

✤ This little boy doesn’t have the education to know that this is dirty, so he just jumps in.

Challenges

✤ When we went to the slum kindergarten, we had to cross a river on a bamboo raft with tires under it.

✤ I can’t imagine the little kids walking all the way from their slum house, which is very far away (we drove), just to go to school, then walking back.

Visits

✤ This is the little school I was talking about. It is about as big as half a science lab at CIS.

✤ We are helping them do arts and crafts. Some of them don’t even know how to use glue.

Slum visit

✤ This is where we built last time.

✤ Behind me is one of the houses we built.

Slum visit

✤ This is the whole school in the image. This is the only study area they have in the whole slum.

✤ This is about 6m by 4m, not very big.

Visits

✤ This is another slum. We have never visited it before, we are just looking around to experience it.

✤ This is a picture of Chris and I

Where they live

✤ You will see what kind of environment they live in.

✤ they are so poor that they don’t even have more than one room for up to 11 people

✤ (see next slide)

A walk through the slums.

✤ In the next slide, there are pictures of me walking through the slum area.

✤ Imagine yourself living there everyday of your life as you look. These people almost never go out of the slum area.

✤ There is also a picture of the kids there.

Starting to build.

✤ We built at a different site this time, starting in the field where there is lots of space for houses and people.

✤ This trip, we are only doing the floors of two houses because we have less people than last time.

✤ This involved mixing cement and shoveling dirt, etc.

A walk through another slum.

✤ This is the back area of the site we built in last time. We only built in the front, not the back, so the back is still slum.

✤ Observe the environment and what they eat/drink.

This is a tuktuk

✤ It is a little seat attached to a bike that someone rides.

✤ It only costs 5 pesos ($0.83HK)to ride it, but people in the slum can’t even afford that.

✤ We enjoyed riding these.

Dec 5, 2010

Thank you for watching!