Life on lockdown at SMDC
For 15 years, Cristine San Pascual, a Senior Assistant Purser doubling as manager of various divisions in a luxury cruiseship,rode the waves — her days spent making sure passengers were happily cruising the seas, docking from city to city, in Asia, Europe and America, their dissatisfactions kept at bay and their exhilaration kept high with the luxuries that a cruise ship offers.
For more than half a year, she would be getting paid to travel and the rest of the year, she’d spend making up for missed milestones with her family. Pleasing disgruntled guests and pampering honeymooners, party-going adventurers and retirees finally freed from corporate drudgery consumed her time onboard.
However, the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic brought the world — along with Sa Pascual’s job — to a halt. What was supposed to be a two-month break plus a few weeks of requested extended vacation turned into months of lockdown.
San Pascual — a wife and a mother of two — is among the 343,000 Filipino overseas workers who found themselves suddenly displaced from their jobs. But she has found relief and an ally in her Trees Residences community in Fairview.
“When the government announced a community quarantine, we asked ourselves, ‘What can we do now?’ I started assessing our resources,” said
San Pascual. “I observed that we ordered too much fast food. Being a condo unit owner myself, I don’t want to be deprived of my favorite nutritious meals just because of the lockdown.”
During the initial phase of the community quarantine, San Pascual and her family saw a sharp rise in the demand for homecooked food since people couldn’t go out, prompting them to roll up their sleeves and start cooking for the residents of Trees. Thus in the middle of a pandemic, Sanpy’s Kitchen was born.
The Good Guys Market speaks of altruism among the merchants and residents.
Her husband and in-laws, who are great cooks, immerse themselves in the kitchen, while she does what she knows best: making her customers happy. The pandemic may have cost San Pascual her seafaring job but not her customer service skills. The new normal having set in, she communicates with customers online, taking their orders and making sure they get to experience sumptuous cooking.
“Our first menu was Crispy Kare-kare, Lumpiang Shanghai,
Silogs and Pansit Bihon. We got few orders at first, then the numbers grew every day. There was even a time I had to prepare 13 different dishes just for one lunch! It was crazy busy but it was fun,” San Pascual said.
On weekends, San Pascual’s schedule is full -- mornings at the residence are bright and abuzz with excitement as an assortment of provisions, from plump cabbage and large, scarlet bell peppers straight from the farms to her rich and hearty stews of Kare-kare and Kaldereta, on sale at Trees Residences through The Good Guys Market, a weekend market set up by SM Development Corporation (SMDC).
The Good Guys Market has paved the way for small, home-based businesses such as Sa Pascual’s to find an immediate customer base right in their own backyard.
She, along with farmers and other food merchants who are also Trees residents, have found a way to cope with the drastic effect of the pandemic on their livelihood — The Good Guys Market. Their fellow residents at Trees are their patrons. They come for farm-to-table vegetables delivered straight from the farms of Pampanga andBenguetandforhot slow-cooked meals.
Sanpy’s Kitchen has become part of a community of Good Guys supporting and looking after each other, people working together and thriving in a crisis, like seeds sprouting during a drought. Every serving of her home-cooked meal and every kilo of greens sold by the farmers at The Good Guys Market speaks of altruism among the merchants and residents.