Causes – click to donate

Where to donate

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Today on the news, we tuned in just in time to hear about the bodies of two Pilipino aid workers recovered from the rubble of the UN offices in Haiti. Let us all offer our prayers for the repose of their souls, and for strength for their families in their time of bereavement…

I have not yet been able to make a donation. I initially wanted to donate through the Episcopal Relief and Development website, as suggested by my mother. After all, it made sense to donate through the Church. But as I was trying it out, the website won’t accept non-US addresses, or perhaps I just haven’t found a way to do so. If you live in the US, do checkout the ERD website and learn how you can donate through them.

At work, I happened to have pulled up Bing.Com and needed to run a search on something, when right there at the bottom of the page I saw this link:

Clicking on How you can help Haiti has brought me to two different pages so far, one is this, and here’s the other. Both pages give you a list of charities where you can donate. Microsoft isn’t accepting donations, but they have already made their pledge of support for the recovery efforts and rebuilding of life in Haiti. They have also committed to matching the donations made by their US employees to their choice of charities (upto $12,000 per employee). I think corporate giants should take a clue from this…

There is no hurry in making a donation. I bet even just blogging about the various channels through which people can help is already a good move. The people of Haiti will need our help for many many months to come.

Save the Children also has this donation page up for their own Haiti fund. I have worked with Save the Children (their UK-Philippines office specifically) and I trust in this charity. Like ER-D, they are already there on the ground so you can be assured that your donations will make it to the intended recipients.

The above links will direct you to many other donation pages, such as UNICEF’s and the Red Cross, go through their lists and find the charity that your heart  is comfortable working with.

For digital scrapbookers, here’s an additional incentive to make a donation. The Daily Digi has a freebie for those who will email them that they have made a contribution to a charity of their own choice. Now I don’t see that they’re asking for any proof of donation, but I hope that no one will abuse this. It’s a wonderful idea though.

Here’s a blogger who is running a contest on blog and tied it in with making donations for Haiti via UNICEF. Scoot over to Cornyman’s Money-Blog where each comment he would match with 10 cents in donation to UNICEF.

Here’s yet another blogger who would donate $1 to God’s Littlest Angels, an orphanage in Haiti, for every blogger or reader who comments about what they have done to donate for the relief efforts. Check out Cents Saved.

Eco Mama also runs a similar comments challenge over at her blog. This is specifically for those who have no means to donate, you simply have to leave a comment on her specific Mercy Corps Haiti Earthquake Relief post and she will match a dollar for each comment and make the donation through Mercy Corps.

So no matter how much you part with, it will count towards helping out the people of Haiti. Recently, my country was devastated by two typhoons and we relied on the world community for aid. Neighbors didn’t fail each other, and strangers were transformed into angels. For others, there is still much help needed. There are families still living in evacuation areas almost three months after the disaster. We know all too well that it will be the same for Haiti.

Oh, and today is our tenth anniversary. ?

Walls of Hope

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In reference to yesterday’s post, all went well at work last night. Everything was smooth sailing, except for the fact that my PC issues haven’t been sorted out yet (I know IT’s working on it though and I thank them so much for that). Thank you for those who wished me well 🙂

One thing though is that I feel like I haven’t been much help to my boss yet. I appreciate so much that he isn’t pressuring me too much, and he’s not trying to make me digest everything all in one go. But he needs to off-load a lot of work, he’s getting sick already! All I can really do is focus on the job at hand so I can be of real help sooner.

Before I transferred back to the program, they ran an incentive program that was supposed to be just in time for Thanksgiving. Agents earned tickets based on their positive customer satisfaction survey results, and these were raffled off today. There were sooooo many prizes. I gotta say, it beats previous incentives we’ve had whether in this program or the last one I was with. The drawing itself must have taken a full hour to finish.

Prizes included Cheetos and Doritos (consolation prizes clearly), but there were also a lot of home appliances like flat irons, DVD players, microwave ovens, colored TV sets (without the tv stand though), washing machines, and a lot more. Yes, all those are in the plural. The fun thing about the way the raffle was done was that we took turns drawing the names of the winners, and when the person was around, he/she would draw from the jar of prizes. I picked the name of one of our own agents, but he ended up picking a can of Pringles as his prize! LOL 🙂 The non agents in attendance (myself included) kept dropping side comments offering to buy the items from the winners, at very low prices of course. I have my eye on one of my agent’s prize – a sandwich maker. 🙂

Enough about my day.

While bloghopping yesterday, I came upon this wonderful project that aims to brighten up the walls of the Philippine Children’s Medical Center:

Here’s a description of the project lifted directly from their site:

Who are we?

Walls of Hope was initiated by a group of friends who have been brought together by their common attachment to the Philippine Children’s Medical Center. We were once patients, students and visitors of PCMC who have been inspired by the wall murals found around the hospital (esp. Gloria Villaraza Guzman’s Munting Patak-ulan).

What is Walls of Hope?

Most of the wall paintings in the hospital have already deteriorated or have been lost due to time. Walls of Hope is our way of giving back to the hospital that once catered to the health needs of our generation back when we were young. This is our attempt to help bring back the hope that the hospital walls has been known to give to its patients and to help sustain it to be experienced by future generations. The presence of these colorful murals is a powerful way of relieving stress and easing the hearts and minds of its visitors.

It is a 3-day event scheduled to happen on December 19-21, 2009. Volunteers are not required to be present during the whole duration of the event – even just an hour of your time already means a lot to us! The goal is to finish painting the whole first floor of the hospital in 3 days!

Click on the banner to hop to their page and find out how you can help out. I doubt if I can volunteer to do any painting, but I will look at other options on how I can donate. I’ve personally never been to the PCMC and have no relatives or friends who’ve had kids confined there, but I know that many kids walk these halls and they need a lot of cheering up, to say the least. I would love to help in any little way I can, I hope you would too.

giveawayad

Drink Coffee, support ECPAT!

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ECPAT-CBTL Christmas campaign

I had blogged about my Starbucks Christmas, but had I known about the tie up between The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf – Tomas Morato and ECPAT Philippines, I would probably have skipped it and patronized this instead.

Then I realized, I don’t have to go through this promo just to support ECPAT and their current projects. I could just as easily come up with the money equivalent to twelve cups of coffee, and hand deliver it to ECPAT myself.  At least I would know that the full amount goes to a very good cause, and not just a portion of it. (So there, I was able to rationalize my Starbucks Christmas – I’d be supporting Spark of Hope which is another charity altogether, on top of supporting ECPAT)

Okay, so if I were to pledge the cash equivalent of 12 cups of coffee, how much money would I have to set aside? Say a drink costs 115 pesos, multiply that by 12… 1380 pesos. That looks like a lot of money if I had to dish it out one time big time. But come to think of it, my rubber shoes cost more than that…

Hmmm. I’m not aware how ECPAT accepts cash donations, or for what specific projects the donations would go to. I should probably get in touch with them and find out. If anyone’s interested in supporting their advocacy (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography, and the Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes) here in the Philippines (there’s an ECPAT International too, and local campaigns in many parts of the world), leave me a message and I’d be more than happy to pass along your contact details to their Info officer or Executive Director should you wish so.


Last week, while exiting ShopWise, Alfred asked me if it was possible to donate to a charity and they’d give us a card in return which we would then give as gifts to friends and family. Then we could say that we made a donation in their name, and they would actually believe us. Maybe we could do that with ECPAT.

Good deeds.

NBS Project Aral 2

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On Saturday, we went to the Megamall along with hundreds of bargain hunters to purchase a few things. We stopped by The Podium (see the boyfriend’s related post here) before we finally went to the bigger mall.

Our first stop at the Mega was the National Bookstore, to do this:

NBS aral packs

and this…

NBS project aral

No, it wasn’t just to pose and have photos taken, silly!

I had heard through a friend that they had this donation drive to provide school children affected by the recent typhoons with study kits. All you had to do was purchase the subsidized kits, write your name on the tag, and drop them off in their boxes. NBS would make sure they get to kids who need them.

We grabbed eight of these, and it felt good to do so.

Now, go out and spend your 25 pesos on one kit. Or set aside a hundred pesos for 4. There’s a branch at Quezon Avenue, a bigger one at Cubao, and everywhere else (uh, most malls I should say).

For more info, check out the NBS Multiply page.

They will also donate 5 pesos for every person who follows them in Twitter, or fan them in Facebook. Go go go!

The Great Flood of 2009

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September 26, 2009 – Typhoon Ondoy hits Metro Manila. Everyone thought it was just going to be another typhoon. One of the many many such storms that pass through this tropical country.

When I woke up at 430AM, the creek in front of our house had already risen and spilled over to the road. My mom asked me to check if the water was receding so my dad could bring the cars back down to our level. No – instead of receding back to the creek, the water level had actually risen. It was just a few feet away from kuya’s car. We woke dad up. He waded through the water and moved the car to safety.

At around 8AM (probably earlier), when I checked again, the water was gone.

At 9AM, the rain hasn’t stopped, and the water was rising – rapidly. After having breakfast, I took my camera out and snapped photos. I was surprised that the water was more than waist deep already out there on what was the road.

Ondoy 004

My cousins were preparing for the inevitable flood – and my nephew was still in good spirits to smile for me:

Ondoy 006

None of us thought that this would be more than just the usual flooding. Who would’ve known that our house, built with the highest flood recorded here in mind, would be chest-deep in water? And that the three-door apartment’s first floor would be completely submerged in water? That’s where my cousins and grandpa live. Who would who would have thought that we would wait until the next morning to see land again?

I would love to share more of my family’s version of the Great Flood of 2009. But I have other things in my mind just now.

No time to worry about my blog, of lost earning opportunities, nor of superficial concerns like acne, nor of getting my hands and feet dirty. It’s four days since the waters receded, and we’re still not done cleaning up. I went back to work last night, and I wish I hadn’t. But I did, and to work I shall be tonight. Which means instead of helping out in the cleaning, to bed I go. Maybe tomorrow, the photos will be ready for posting.

Please consider donating and/or volunteering for the victims of Typhoon Ondoy. A lot of people were more devastated than we were.

Here’s some info on how you can help: http://www.google.com/landing/typhoon-ondoy.html

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