Four Carts

Every Saturday in Cavite City, volunteers pushed four carts five to six kilometers. They set up stations. They ran a short lesson. They went on to the next stop.

Kari carried values, and a canteen. Toni carried play and hygiene. Trio carried literacy, and a computer. Nic was the clinic.

The route had four stops in the same city: a marketplace, a dumpsite, Himlayang Caviteño, and a Badjao community. Himlayang Caviteño is a cemetery. On Saturdays it was a classroom. The carts came to the market. They came to the dumpsite. They came to the cemetery, for class. They came to a Badjao street. Then the volunteers pushed on.

These were his figures for 2009. About sixty children at the market. About sixty at the cemetery. Seventy or eighty at the dumpsite. As many as ninety on a Badjao street. The local scale around the work that year sat nearer one hundred fifty to two hundred volunteers, and three hundred to four hundred fifty children.

The lesson itself was small. About fifteen minutes of reading, writing, and values. Then food. Bread and juice. Kari was the canteen cart. Bystanders yelled basurero, trash collectors. Stones were thrown at the carts. The stations still went up. The fifteen minutes still ran. Bread and juice still came after.

"Before, their motivation was food… Now the kids are more excited to learn and read their books."

The carts were late to the work. In August 1997, Peñaflorida and high-school classmates in Cavite City formed Dynamic Teen Company. About twenty members. They worked under Club 8586. The co-founders with him were Rezcel Fajardo and Jefferson Bernal. Harnin Manalaysay was the mentor. He was born about 1981. By 2009 he was in his late twenties, on a Saturday that had taken years to look like this.

They did not start with kariton. They started with plastic bags. Then backpacks. Then a donated pedicab. A volunteer who sold corn told them to drop it. Use a kariton, a pushcart, instead. The named project, Kariton, Klasrum, at Klinik, is dated to 2004. By 2009 those jobs had been split across Kari, Toni, Trio, and Nic.

On weekdays he taught at Palm Ridge School, a private school in Imus/Molino. Saturdays were the four carts and the four stops.

Rezcel Fajardo had been there since August 1997. Jefferson Bernal too, as a co-founder. Rezcel was still speaking in 2009.

"He is a modern-day hero. He would use his meager salary to buy food for the kids. In fact, he had already pledged the prize money to the children he is helping, should he win."

He grew up in Cavite City, in a shanty near a dumpsite, the second of three children. His parents are Lucila and Efren Peñaflorida Sr. His father was a driver. His mother, in his telling, was a laundrywoman.

He has said he grew up poor, and that at school he was mocked, bullied, and discriminated against. In grade six, he later said, a stone flew in front of him, then he was hit. He has said he wanted to settle scores with the bullies, then realized he could turn a bad experience into something positive.

Some parents wanted the children begging rather than sitting for the fifteen minutes. He has said they told those parents that the children, even though very young, had rights, and that those rights included opportunities for learning, and that the parents had rights too.

In 2009 he was named Hero of the Year. The prize was twenty-five thousand dollars, then one hundred thousand more, one hundred twenty-five thousand in all. The public vote was about 2.75 million ballots cast in total, not his personal count. He said nothing was for him. He was there to represent the poor children of the Philippines. Ninety percent of the money was meant for Dynamic Teen Company, ten percent for the church.

On 27 November 2009, Lucila met him at NAIA.

"Very proud ako sa kanya."