A Week in the Philippines with DWC

I spent the last week in the Philippines on the island of Cebu volunteering through Developing World Connections at Sam-Eng elementary school.

• Yes, you read that right: volunteering, for a week, in a foreign country.
• Even though I’m not retired and work a “real job”.

Some background: one of Salesforce’s principles is “business is the greatest platform for change”, and Salesforce implements this through a 1/1/1 model:

• Donating 1% of time, 1% of equity, and 1% of product to volunteer organizations throughout the world.

For the “1% of time” piece, employees get 56 hours/seven days of volunteer time off, “VTO”, each year. One of my personal goals is to fully use this. Last year I spent a week in Sri Lanka, this year I went to the Philippines.

Sam-Eng elementary has over 300 students(!) in grades 1 - 6. Since there are two classes each of grades 4 - 6, the school needs nine classrooms for each class to have its own room. The school previously had enough rooms, but in 2021 one of the school’s buildings was destroyed by Typhoon Odette leaving them short.

DWC partnered with a local organization, Rise Above, to construct a new building consisting of three classrooms to alleviate this shortage. We were the last of three teams, thus the building was structurally complete but needed a lot of interior work to be finished. The main jobs we had to do were:

1. Attach and paint ~40 particle board ceiling tiles
2. Sand and paint the concrete walls
3. Install ceiling lights and wall fans

The first job is where I spent most of the time as it was quite a bit of work. We had to align the board on the aluminum supports, drill pilot holes, and then manually fix it in place using rivets.

'Use your head!' was a common joke while installing ceiling tiles

We made steady progress on the ~30 tiles which required no modification to fit: just align, drill, rivet, repeat. However, the final 10 took half the total time as they required some amount of fitting to the space: trimming to match a smaller width/length, carving out sections to go around a support column, leaving space for the forthcoming electrical work, etc.

As we were warned, the local foreman won't really care for much PPE

Once the tiles were fixed to the ceiling, we filled in the small cracks between them using a type of putty, sanded it to be smooth, and then painted over the entire thing. There was a lot of square footage to cover, so even with eight of us painting it still took almost an entire day to do.

Filling the cracks between the ceiling tiles

Sanding down the putty to be smooth

The end result looked great and is ready to be used by the school:

Before

After

Comparing to Sri Lanka

I did a markedly similar trip to Sri Lanka last year: building a classroom at a rural school in Tegalle. Something which surprised me in the Philippines is even though the two countries look quite similar on paper:

• GDP per capita: $4516 vs $4350
• Human Development Index: 0.776 vs 0.720
• Gini: 39.8 vs 39.3

…the Philippines appeared a lot more developed in many ways, both big and small:

• Cebu’s airport was much newer, cleaner, and nicer than Colombo, Sri Lanka.
• 5G cell service was extensive, available just about everywhere we went on the island, whereas Sri Lanka only had LTE in the cities and spotty 3G everywhere else.
• The school had reliable electricity, thus there was a surprisingly large TV in every classroom, electric fans and lights, and even a chilled water dispenser – my high school in the states didn’t even have chilled water fountains the first two years I was there!

I’m not sure how this difference is managing to hide among the statistics above. The only explanation I could come up with is the Philippine economy is growing substantially at almost 8%/year, whereas Sri Lanka’s has been pretty much flat. I’m not an economist, but maybe “a rising tide lifts all boats” truly is the explanation here.

Overall this more-developed impression left a lot of us with conflicted feelings: on the one hand, it made the “tourism” part of the trip a lot better – I could actually see myself coming back to Cebu for a true vacation (I have no interest in a Sri Lanka vacation).

…but that also meant the work didn’t feel as meaningful, as the school didn’t seem to need us as much. That left us questioning if this was truly the best use of the time, money, and resources spent on this trip.

It Wasn’t All Work, Though

As usual, the best part of the trip was the kids, made quite a bit easier by the fact that they spoke pretty good English—orders of magnitude better than my Bisaya. With the lack of playground it was a lot of “stand in a circle”-style games vs the more active team sports I prefer, but it was still fun.

The other activity I like to do is give the kids math problems, but I completely forgot what level 4th graders are at and tried to give them algebra and geometry problems… and got blank stares in return. Oops.

Thankfully ChatGPT came to the rescue with suggestions like long division, large-number addition, multiplication tables, and sequences. Once I figured out the appropriate level of difficulty we had a lot of fun giving each other problems to solve. It was fulfilling seeing the quiet, shy kids who didn’t join in the group games come out of their shell and rock the math problems.

The 4th graders I spent a couple hours doing math with.
I forgot to take a photo of us actually doing the problems unfortunately

Getting a tattoo!

Honestly my favorite ‘cultural’ interaction wasn’t at the school, but rather by our hotel. There was a public basketball court nearby where kids from the surrounding area would play streetball. On the last night a group of us went over and played a couple pickup games with them and we had a blast. My only regret from the trip was not discovering this sooner, as had I known I would have played with them every night.

I haven't touched a basketball in years
...but being a foot taller than the competition can make up for a lot of flaws

Landing the Plane

Did we have a positive impact? Yes.

• The school had way more kids per sq. ft. of classroom space compared to the US, at least double if not triple.
• They needed the new building, and we delivered that.

But was this the place which needed us most? I don’t think it was. And that weighed on us some.

After discussing this with the trip leader, Marty, he suggested we try the trips DWC runs in Kenya or Nepal, as the need there is apparent the moment you arrive.

I think that’s where I’ve landed: I had fun, the kids were great, I recommend Cebu as a vacation spot if the tropics are your thing, but I want the next volunteer trip I do to be in a place which is less developed and needs our help more.