Teen with big dreams for family battles leukemia

Minandro Pascual

Buying a fishing boat for his father and a house for the family was one of Minandro Pascual’s dreams until he was forced to drop out of school right after he was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in July 2015.

“Being the eldest in a brood of five, he kept on telling me about doing this or that, and improving our family’s situation. In fact, he was able to avail himself of a scholarship from a group of Korean nuns who put up a foundation here in the Philippines,” Pascual’s mother, Grace Amaro, told the Inquirer.

At the time he dropped out of school, Pascual was a freshman at Philippine Maritime Institute. He had just been attending classes for two weeks when he got sick.

To pay for their son’s chemotherapy sessions, Amaro and her husband, Armando, who fishes for a living, were forced to sell their boat. The family lives in Dagat-dagatan, Caloocan City.

With the help of different agencies, institutions and kindhearted strangers, Pascual, who is now 19 years old, has completed seven of the 14 chemotherapy cycles prescribed by doctors at Philippine Children’s Medical Center.

He is scheduled to undergo the eighth session on Oct. 12. Each cycle costs P22,048.

Grace Amaro can be reached at 091008595717. Deposits can be made to her BPI account (#3979-3812-38).