Pleasant surprise in ‘Project Shoe box’

LUCENA CITY – Soldiers and a sorority launched “Project Shoe box” in February hoping to collect 1,000 shoe boxes and fill these with school supplies for children in some of the poorest parts of Southern Luzon.

To their surprise, the number of shoe boxes and school supplies exceeded their expectation and an Army official attributed the interest that the project drew from donors to a previous Inquirer story about it.

Soon after the Philippine Daily Inquirer first came out with the story on March 8, the Army’s Camp Guillermo Nakar here started to be flooded with shoe boxes and school supplies.

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Sedano Jr., head of 4th Light Armor Battalion (LAB) based in Camp Nakar, said the latest inventory showed there were now enough school supplies for 15,000 elementary pupils.

“The Inquirer story gave more meaning to the project. We were already happy if we could meet our target of 1,000 boxes but your story changed it all,” said Sedano.

He said after the Inquirer story came out, donors like the National Bookstore Foundation and SM Foundation responded quickly, donating at least 13,000 packs of school supplies. Donations also came from civic and religious groups.

The cargo firm 2GO Express offered to ship the donations for free to beneficiaries.

Sedano said the 4th LAB collected at least 2,000 shoe boxes while 2GO Express, which also donated boxes weighing a kilogram each for the supplies, helped fill the void.

Most of the donations didn’t have to be transferred to the shoe boxes as they were packed ready for distribution. Some donors wrote addresses in the packs to open a channel of communication between donors and beneficiaries.

Jennie Litan, of the sorority Sigma Alpha-University of the Philippines-Los Baños, said her group’s partnership with the 4th LAB started when her group found it had enough school supplies to donate to poor children but didn’t have the means to distribute these.

Sedano, whose sister is a member of the sorority, said he picked up the concept for the project in the United States in 2007 when he attended a religious service there.

Shoe boxes were collected during the religious service and filled with school supplies and medicines for shipping to children in Africa, he said.

Shoe boxes are ideal storage items for school supplies because these could withstand transport through some of the country’s worst roads.

In the past several days, soldiers and members of the sorority were busy stuffing boxes with notebooks, pads, pencils, crayons, erasers, books and personal care items like face towels, combs and slippers.

The Army wants to start distributing these on June 11 to Agta children in Sierra Madre. At least 52 other sites in Mindoro Oriental, Mindoro Occidental, Masbate, Quezon, Laguna and Camarines Norte were picked as beneficiaries.