US chef is ‘Santa’ to malnourished kids

CHILDREN benefit from a feeding program by Tagum City Children’s Relief Service Inc., a group founded by retired American chef David Wasson, who founded the civic organization to help curb child malnutrition in the city’s 23 villages. FRINSTON L. LIM

At exactly 9 a.m. for 12 straight weekends, a bulky vehicle with its load of big cooking pans and a crew of amiable women lumbers its way to Tagum City to feed malnourished children and their parents.

For parents and children in the city’s poorest communities in Davao del Norte province, the sight of the white truck was akin to an early Christmas present.

Behind the wheel of this mobile kitchen is David Wasson, a 62-year-old American who relocated to Tagum after his retirement as a chef in Seattle, Washington, about seven years ago.

A successful chef and educator who did Bill Gates’ wedding reception in 1995, Wasson founded Tagum City Food Bank (TCFB), now Tagum City Children’s Relief Service Inc. (CRSI), two years after he moved in with his Filipina girlfriend in Mankilam village.

The American decided to put up TCFB as he saw the need of providing proper nutrition to preschool children in his new community.

Nutrition problems

“I was struck by the weight of the children, and after asking the barangay health workers, I began to see some serious problems about their nutrition,” Wasson said.

“It’s when you realize their age that you see how bad their condition is. Children weighing less than what they should be at their particularly age, hair falling out, and some kids having heart conditions,” he said.

Together with his fiancée, Emily, a 39-year-old guard he had met in Luzon, Wasson decided to feed malnourished children in Mankilam at least twice a month.

Using a multicab-type jeep and two big kettles, the couple would gather malnourished children in their community and give them a complete meal of rice, meat and vegetables. Village health volunteers would assist them in identifying child-beneficiaries, or “partners” as they called them.

But the former chef and educator, who started cooking his own food when he was 9 years old, soon realized the children had to eat regularly for their health and nutrition to improve.

“The baby has to eat every day,” said Wasson, adding that the most crucial age bracket to arrest malnutrition is from 0-5 years old.

Preschoolers

“Preschool age is the most important stage in a child’s growth and development, so you have to see to it that children in this age bracket get the proper nutrition. The child’s success later in life is determined by how healthy he (or she) was as a preschooler,” he explained.

At first, Wasson would conduct a mass feeding for about 250 children once or twice a month, with funds taken from his monthly teacher’s pension. As the need to regularly feed the children grew, he pitched the idea of putting up a food bank to local officials in Mankilam. Village leaders agreed to donate a building and with Wasson’s $300 (about P12,000 in 2010) refurbished the structure that became the village food bank.

Wasson also established linkages with nongovernment and civic organizations such as Rotary Club of Tagum City and Chef and Child Foundation. On July 23, 2010, TCFB was officially born.

Donations from local Rotarians and those from abroad enabled the nongovernment organization to acquire a vehicle that was converted into a mobile kitchen.

Wasson’s ‘angels’

Helping Wasson were six rural health volunteers, whom he affectionately referred to as “angels.” The women, who receive only over P1,000 each every year as an honorarium from Wasson, are the front-liners in gathering data about malnourished children in target communities and in keeping records about the health and nutrition data of the children using the body-mass index.

“We have to see to it that data about the children’s weight and height are taken and recorded accurately for us to really monitor if the child’s nutrition has improved or not,” said Rose Masauding, a health worker from San Miguel who was among the “angels.”

When the Inquirer joined CRSI last Saturday, the group was on its fifth week feeding 132 malnourished children in Visayan Village, Tagum’s second most populous barangay after Mankilam.

The 53-year-old Masauding, a health worker for about a decade, said she and her five colleagues get P2,000 each in yearly honorarium from the city government.

“I opted to volunteer because I pitied the children. I want them to become healthy,” Masauding told the Inquirer as she assisted a frail, 3-year-old boy step on a weighing scale pushed against a yellow-painted wall of the village hall.

Feeding program

According to the government’s National Economic and Development Authority, Davao region, where Tagum is located, has the lowest malnutrition prevalence in the country. Using the Philippine Reference Standards, the number of malnourished children from 0 to 5 years old has been on the decline over the period of 1993-2003.

The National Nutrition Survey pegged the malnutrition prevalence among children ages 0-5 years old in the region at 23.1 percent in 2005 and is forecast to slide to 13.1 percent by 2015.

In spite of the rosy picture, Davao del Norte in general—and Tagum, in particular—has, when it comes to child nutrition, hundreds of children in the city who are still malnourished.

Wasson said his group had already fed about 600 children in at least nine of the city’s 23 barangays and that the program had restored to health at least 95 percent of the children, except those with heart conditions and other medical problems.

To ensure the children were fed regularly, they were given 3 kilos of rice each per week, with Wasson telling parents and other adults who bring their children to the feeding program that the rice was for the sole consumption of the malnourished children.

“I kept telling the parents and other adults, ‘It’s the baby’s rice and not the whole family’s.’ You have to give bugas (rice) every week because you can’t feed a baby once a week and after that the weight goes up,” Wasson said. “The baby needs to eat adlaw-adlaw (daily).”

Wasson said the government could introduce a regular school-based feeding program nationwide. He said the program might not cost much and that its effects to the development of children could be far-reaching. “If you go to first-grade and malnourished, you can’t learn.”

His feeding program only costs P33 for a complete, heavy meal for each child.

Weight gains

The American also discouraged the typical practice of serving rice porridge in mass feeding. “I hate lugaw,” Wasson said.

For Mary Ann Guayan, the feeding program has helped ease the burden of the family in providing proper nourishment to her 4-year-old son, Dominik.

“This really helped a lot because it provided additional rice supply for my malnourished child,” said the 39-year-old wife of a chain saw operator.

Dominik weighed 6.35 kilograms (14 pounds) when he was measured a week after his first feeding, up from his previous weight of 5.9 kg (13 lb).

Six-year-old Embert Tabura weighed 7.03 kg (15.5 lb) when he joined the feeding program three Saturdays before. A week later, he gained a 0.45 kg (1 lb), only to shed it when his weight was taken on the next weekend.

“He was sickly. Every time he feels ill, he refuses to eat and his weight drops,” said Embert’s mother Esterlita, 48.

Aside from rice, the children were allowed to borrow books to read at home every week and were given toys.

Community service

Recently, Wasson was nominated one of the outstanding Tagumeños for community service during the city’s 17th founding anniversary.

For Wasson, helping malnourished children in Tagum regain their health was his new-found mission in life. He left the United States looking for a simple and peaceful place to retire, but the chef in him nagged him to do something to feed malnourished children.

“Being a chef is not only about satisfying people’s hunger. You can make people happy. You can heal the sick. You can really affect people’s lives with food. I learned that as a 9 year old,” he said.

“Now I’m retired, but these little guys can’t afford to pay me even P1 for the food I give them. Before, I used to feed the rich. I even did Bill Gates’ wedding reception back in Seattle for $834 a person, and yet I like this more. And I receive not even a peso per person,” Wasson said.