Lessons in Humanity
Teachers at Longos National High School in Malabon go beyond school walls and give relief goods to 140 students
The school year is not yet over, but the teachers at Longos National High School (LNHS) in Malabon City have not seen their students in over two months. Like all other schools in the region, their routine was disrupted by the health crisis. They soon realized that their role as a teacher was to be tested. Not only were they turning to online resources to deliver the rest of their lessons, trying their best to learn on the job, but they also found that some of the lessons they needed to teach their students were off the textbook.
Many of the students have little to no access to the Internet, relying on the free service of Messenger in order to communicate with their teachers.
“Good pm sir,” a student asked their teacher through Messenger in April. “Kailan na po pasukan sa school? (When do we go to school?)”
“Wala pa balita (There is no news yet),” replied Angel Laysico, a mathematics teacher for the ninth grade at LNHS. “Wait nalang tayo announcement from DepEd.”
“Ahhh ok po, sir. Salamat po.” Laysico could have easily left the conversation there. The student asked a question and he, as his teacher, answered to the best of his capabilities. But after seeing the students day-in and day-out, watching them learn and grow over the months and even years, then suddenly being quarantined, he had to know and had to ask:
“Kamusta naman? (How are you?)”
“Sa bahay lang po sir (I am just at home),” the student replied. “Nakakatakot po lumabas ng bahay. Sana matapos na crisis sir. Halos wala na din po kami makain dito. Wala po nakakapagwork sa amin. (It is scary to leave the house. I hope this crisis will be over. We almost have nothing to eat. There is no work for any of us.)”
“Sana nga,” Laysico said, unsure if he was prepared for such an answer, wishing he could offer advice, words of comfort, even something more. “Basta always stay at home. Matatapos din lahat ng ito. (This will all be over.)” When he talked to his fellow teachers, Laysico found that they were all worried about their students. At this point it wasn’t about whether they were behind or not in their lessons, they were concerned about the welfare and health of these young people who they felt responsible for. This would be a defining moment in their students’ adolescent lives, and they wanted to make sure that, in the middle of the crisis, they knew what community meant.
“At first I was hesitant to organize a donation drive with the other teachers since we had our own families,” Laysico told me. “But when we heard about the situation of our students, the spirit of being a second parent to our students reigned. […] Our responsibility as a teacher doesn’t stop inside the school, it goes beyond that.”
The teachers of LNHS came and pooled together R35,000 from their own savings, from their families, from wherever they could find any little bit that could be spared. They transferred funds to each other online and one teacher went around on his bicycle to collect cash donations from others who did not use Internet banking.
“Crisis isn’t selective, that’s a fact, but the difficulty of enduring it varies from person to person,” Ricky John Ranido, an English teacher at LNHS, told me. “Our school has an active program in combating malnutrition and hunger, even on those days that our students were with us. We believe that those two would affect our students’ academic and class performance. What more these days that they are in quarantine?”
They used the money to put together relief packages that consisted of five kilos of rice, two packs of coffee, two packs of instant noodles, two pieces of canned goods, and a box of chocolate biscuits. One-hundredforty students from LNHS between grades seven and 10 received relief goods, those most in need, as well as the janitors, security guards, and clerks of the school.
“I felt such privilege when I was selected to be one of the recipients of their outreach program,” said Niko Recto, an eighth-grade student at LNHS. “In our family, where we are solely [dependent] on our father’s income, the need for food is hard to meet at this time. My father is just one of the many truck drivers who have been affected by work stoppage and obviously cannot transition to a work from home set up.”
“Considering the fact that our teachers and non-teaching personnel are also facing and enduring the same crisis and only earning enough to sustain the needs of their families, they still choose to provide aid,” Recto added. “Truly, they are our second parents.”