Savior to street oldies

Sanchez comforts Nenita Padilla, 61, who was bedridden after her third stroke. She’d seek DSWD help to get her a wheelchair, Sanchez promised. LYN RILLON

BACOOR CITY—Former bank teller Bennielita “Bennie” Sanchez, 40, always carries around some cash sorted in colorful plastic envelopes that come in handy whenever she meets the homeless.

A Catholic lay minister, she picks up homeless and abandoned old folk off the streets and takes care of them until they are reunited with their families or are “rescued” by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD).

Before this interview, Sanchez insisted on checking on her friend, Lola Melly.  It’s been a while, she said of this 80-year-old she had met at the Cooperatives for Christ-Cavite, where Sanchez is a volunteer.

But she emerged heartbroken from the visit. Lola Melly had passed on, she was told.

Heartbreak

Heartbreak is a risk, Sanchez said, recalling how she once saw an old woman knocking on doors to beg. She was frail, thin and blind in one eye. Her parents had fed her and given her some clothes.

That started a routine that had Sanchez bringing bags of groceries to the woman’s house in a poor, coastal village in Bacoor City.

“Then came my birthday. I told my mother I didn’t want any other guest but this lola,” Sanchez said. Her mother came back with grim news: the old woman had died two weeks earlier.

Sanchez is not keen about the ages and names of people she helps.  In fact, she identifies them based on their striking physical feature or where she first saw them, she said of Lola Bulag (blind) and Lola SM.  She must have helped around 30 elderly people, she said.

Helping them was a habit she must have picked up from her parents, she said. “Perhaps, I just grew up thinking that wasn’t anything extraordinary,” Sanchez said.

Rewarding

But helping out could sometimes be extraordinarily rewarding, as in the case of this old woman Sanchez saw wandering the streets aimlessly.

After coordinating with village officials, they eventually traced the woman’s address. It turned out she belongs to a wealthy family and had simply lost her way in the city.

Sometimes, the encounters would turn out to be surprising, even surreal.

Sanchez, who has been active in church activities since 1998, recalled how an old woman once grabbed her arm in Baclaran and asked, “Child, where are we going home?”

After filing a police report, Sanchez took the woman home to Cavite and was greeted with surprise by her younger sister, Rosario. “Is that Nanay with you?” her sister asked.

“The lola apparently looked like our mother,” Sanchez said of her mother who passed away in December 2006.  Her father followed about six months later.

For two weeks, the woman stayed in their parents’ room, as Sanchez and her sister looked for ways to find her family through the DSWD and local officials.  The woman, they later learned, lived in Dasmariñas City, and her children had been looking for her for the past five years.  She died a few weeks after being reunited with them.

Foundation

Sanchez, who wants to put up a home care facility for the elderly, seems to have a natural affinity with homeless elderly folk.  “I don’t know why, but my heart beats really fast every time I see a lolo or lola wandering the streets,” she said.

“I pity the poor but I feel that younger ones have more chances of surviving the streets [than the elderly]. Sometimes, I imagine myself being old and sick and alone in the streets and I just can’t bear it,” she said.

In 2010, Sanchez tried to register her foundation with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but was told that foundations must have a physical office and at least P1 million in funding.

Despite that rebuff, Sanchez continues her advocacy, which she calls Starfish LEAF (Love Elderly Abandoned, Found in the street), as inspired by the popular American essay, “The Star Thrower,” about a boy who picks up starfish on the shore and throws them back into the ocean. Told that he cannot possibly return all the starfish in the water, the boy says he can at least make a difference with one.

“I’d like to think of myself as a leaf used to pick up a starfish, (by) providing temporary shelter,” said Sanchez, who used to set aside a portion of her salary and give P500 or grocery items to homeless old people. But she had to quit her job when her mother fell ill.

Persistence

These days, Sanchez finds ways to raise funds—making and selling rosary bracelets, and once, joining a singing contest in her parish dressed as a nun, with the prize money given to an old man struggling to raise two mentally ill children.

She has a long way to go to raise P1 million for her foundation, but persistence is Sanchez’s main weapon, one she wields when she shows up at barangay halls or DSWD offices to convince their personnel to rescue another elderly off the street.

She’s lighthearted about it as well, saying she’d name her home care advocacy, “Star Magic.”

“If you buy a bracelet, you’d qualify for the ‘Star Circle.’  If you donate coffee, sugar and cream [for the elderly], you’d be called ‘Starbucks,’” she said.