Healing Hunger

Reach Out Feed Philippines makes sure kids in some of the poorest areas of the country head to school with delicious and nutritious baon.

- Cristina Sebastian

In the Philippines, the sight of malnourished children is so common, many of us accept it as something we can’t do anything about. In fact, a recent study by the Food and Nutrition Research Institute found that the current rate of chronic malnutrition among children aged 0 to 2 is at the highest in 10 years. Most malnourished children suffer decreased learning capacity when compared to healthier kids of the same age. And this is a reality Dawn Cabigon saw with her own eyes.

A PERSONAL STAKE

“I studied in a public school, and during the ‘80s and ‘90s, students were mainly categorized into two sections. The Fast Learners (FL) and the Slow Learners (SL),” Dawn says. “I sure thought I was smarter than the kids in the SL sections, but growing up I realized the real difference. It was poverty and access to food. The kids in the SL sections had no lunchboxes, nor the money to buy in our canteen. They were mostly thin, dirty, and sick. No wonder they had little interest in school.” Now a parent to two young children herself, Dawn couldn’t bear seeing this kind of suffering.