Good Samaritans band together to give poor families their daily ‘pandesal’

DAILY RATION Around 300 families in Payatas, Quezon City, are the beneficiaries of a project to make sure needy households have enough to eat during the quarantine period. —Photo courtesy of Fr. Danny Pilario

Every morning, urban poor families from Barangay Payatas, Quezon City, struggling to cope with hunger because of the Luzon-wide lockdown would get their daily bread from a group of Good Samaritans.

Since March 29, Fr. Danny Pilario of the St. Vincent School of Theology, whose parish was in Payatas, had been ensuring that a bag of hot pandesal would reach the most vulnerable families in the community, regardless of religious affiliation.“This suffices for breakfast. We just need coffee with this” and “We can save our rice for lunch and dinner,” were some of the comments from beneficiaries, according to Pilario.

Women church leaders were in charge of distributing the bags of bread as they knew who among their neighbors had nothing, including scavengers and waste segregators.

As of now, they have been able to provide for 300 target families every day, thanks to a generous donation from a civic group called Bread of Salt Initiative.

“We are looking to sustain and expand this initiative. A single pandesal costs P2. Twenty pesos can feed one family and provide jobs for the bakers and their staff,” said Pilario.

Aside from feeding the poor, the initiative has also helped sustain the operations of six community bakeries in Payatas.

Pilario met one of the donors, Oya Arriola, while working with children in Payatas who were orphaned by extrajudicial killings in the drug war.

Arriola was only one of several people from Bread of Salt Initiative who came together to feed the poor with pandesal.

The project started with three community bakeries in Quezon City just last week.

“The scheme is what I call a left-to-right form of help. You help small community bakeries keep afloat while helping families and individuals in need,” said Rach Tambay, who is also with the group.

Tambay said their college organization, the University of the Philippines-Samasa Alumni Association, with the help of the Pi Sigma Delta Sorority, also wanted to respond to the call to help dormers, faculty and personnel who were cut off from their families because of the lockdown. In UP Diliman, they have partnered with the University Food Service Bakery and a community bakery in Teachers’ Village.

Lawyer Marvin Aceron, one of the project initiators, said they had noticed that government action was taking time and people in poor communities were going hungry.

“So, inspired by the gospel on the multiplication of the loaves and snatching the name from a short story written by National Artist for Literature NVM Gonzales, we started Bread of Salt Initiative,” he said.

“That NVM Gonzales story tells us [that] it’s the bread of the poor. It’s nourishment from one human being to another.”

His wife, visual artist Celeste Lecaroz, started the project with her own money—P2,000 that bought 1,000 pieces of pandesal for 100 families in Barangay Paligsahan, Quezon City.

The Executive Parent Teacher Council of the Philippine Science High School then donated the first P50,000 to sustain the effort.

As of Tuesday, the Bread of Salt Initiative had delivered around 30,000 pandesal to 4,000 households.

Arriola and Tambay also managed to get donations not just from UP and their friends but also from individuals from as far as Europe and the United States. From the humble initiative in Barangay Paligsahan, the project has been replicated in various barangays and urban poor communities in Quezon City, as well as in Barangay Niugan, Malabon; San Jose del Monte, Bulacan; and Sampaloc, Manila.

“To help more hungry people, we’re campaigning for others to replicate it in their localities. That is how we can achieve the multiplication of the bread,” said Aceron.

The mission is simple, according to him: If you have an extra P1,000, go to your bakery, buy 500 pieces of pandesal and ask your barangay officials to distribute.

“It’s not difficult to find the hungry,” Aceron said.