Staff Blog

A little toddler boy goes walking down the hallway during the school day pushing a cart.  It looks cute and some people pause to watch.  If you didn't know the back story, you wouldn't really think twice about it except that he seems a bit young to be at school.  Maybe you'd wonder why he is pushing the cart or why he is wearing ankle weights.  Otherwise, it wouldn't seem all that significant. 

Back up a couple of years.  This little guy had some significant troubles when learning how to walk, so the therapists started physical therapy to help strengthen his legs. The therapists kept working with the little guy and he started to make small gains.  Then, when he had enough strength and coordination to stand and walk with assistance, they had the idea of making a suspension harness.  What a cool contraption!  And the little guy got really good at walking and even running in that thing. 

Now the next step to becoming stronger and more coordinated while walking needed a new kind of aid, something like a walker that old people use sometimes.  So a cart was made just the right size and weight to be able to move around, but still provide some support.  To make the exercise even more beneficial, ankle weights were added to the mix. 

So that's the cute, excited toddler with the blue cart and weights on his legs walking around school each day.  It's taken a lot of hard work and ingenuity, but it's been worth it.  Look at him go!    

Last October we entered the Support Give-Away Contest for Resource Mate, the library automation program we use at Cebu Children of Hope School.  It doesn't sound too glamorous, but we thought it would be worth it to submit the required essay to see if we could win a year of free tech support.  The essay had to describe how Resource Mate helps impact our community.  Well, we just found out we won the contest!!!  Woo Hoo!!!

Here's the essay we submitted:

It’s library day and Eugene wants to check out the next book in the Ranger’s Apprentice series.  He looks at the spine label and heads to the “Fla” part of the Fiction section.  Juliet wants to check out a Clifford book.  She read one in her class and is excited there are more books about Clifford.  I help her look in the Easy section and we hunt for the spine labels that have “Bri.”  Mary Grace is ready to tackle chapter books and wants to know where to look for ones for girls.  I point her in the direction of the Fiction section of books with spine labels that read “Ame” for American Girl books.  Maybe she’d like to try a Junie B. Jones book too.  The Level B reading class is studying about camouflage.  A bunch of the kids ask where to find books about animals that use camouflage.  We brainstorm about how to do that and someone remembers that we should search on the Resource Mate computer using the keyword camouflage.  The Reading Challenge contest is in full swing.  Kids race into the library each day to return their books and check out a new stack to read at home.  Teacher Amanda comes into the library looking for books on the theme of risks and consequences.  She searches and finds a number of books she can check out and keep in the classroom for the kids to read while they are working on this topic.  Teacher Alfie stops in right before leaving for the day to check out some books to read to his girls at home.  Sounds like a pretty normal day in the life of a library. 

But the library at Cebu Children of Hope School is anything but normal or typical in this city of 866,000 people with one public library.  Our library serves the community of children who reside at Children’s Shelter of Cebu, an orphanage in Cebu City, Philippines and the staff who work with the children.  All of the children who come to live at Children’s Shelter of Cebu are from the surrounding communities on the island of Cebu or neighboring islands.  The vast majority of the children have either never attended school or have attended very little.  When the children start attending school at Children of Hope School, they often do not know the letters of the alphabet much less how to read.  Usually it is safe to say no one has ever had a book read to them.  Needless to say, they have never seen a library. 

The children are thrilled to learn what a library is.  No one has to convince them how cool it is to browse the shelves of books and check out books to take home to the shelter.  Teachers have also often never been inside a proper library.  To have an automated system and thousands of books at their fingertips is pretty unbelievable.  The children and teachers are taught how to look for books in the library.  They learn what spine labels and bar codes are and how the books are organized on the shelves.  They are taught how to search for books by title, author, subject, or keyword.  The children hover around the Resource Mate computer in the library eager to have their books scanned so they can start reading their selections. 

Most of the children who come through the doors of the shelter and school are adopted either locally or internationally.  Currently the children have been adopted into families in fourteen different countries around the world.  The experience and knowledge gained at our school and in our library goes with them to their new countries, communities, and families. 

On the surface, the little library at Cebu Children of Hope School seems pretty normal, but every day really is a little bit miraculous in our slice of the world on the tiny island of Cebu in the Pacific Ocean. 

Kurume Christ Church, hence KCC, is a church in the city of Higashi Kurume in the greater Tokyo area in Japan.  KCC is significant for a number of reasons, but one reason is that it is the only church in Asia that supports CSC on an on-going basis.  Kurume Christ Church became aware of CSC many years ago through the friendship of Paul and Shari Reasoner and Taizo and Kimiko Morimoto.  Taizo is the pastor of Kurume Christ Church.  Pastor Morimoto wanted his church members to broaden their experience of helping people in need, so he suggested a team of people go to Cebu to see the shelter.  Since that initial trip, a number of people who attend KCC have visited and volunteered at the shelter.  A nurse came to help the nurses at the shelter,  t-shirts were given to all of the workers and children at the shelter, a high school student volunteered in the medical department to enhance her pursuit of a career in medicine, and the church sponsors CSC children through the Foster Friends program.   So KCC has been creative in its involvment with CSC. 

Next week the Reasoner clan in Cebu (Joel, Jinkee, Ethan, Shari and Paul) is heading up to Japan to visit friends, family, Morimotos, and KCC.  It will be great to update and thank the church people in person for their continued support of the shelter.  

Heart, a new girl, came to the shelter the other day and I was immediately struck by her name.  It’s different.  And it seems like there might be a story behind the name.  I wonder what it is. 

There is often a reason behind why a name is chosen for a child.  Maybe you know the story behind your name.  Sometimes parents just liked the name.  Sometimes it was chosen to remember a family member or carry on a tradition.  Other times a name is picked for its meaning. 

Of course, most of the kids at CSC have names already when they arrive at the shelter.  The variety of the names is kind of fascinating.  There are plenty of “normal” names like Grace, Cris, Mark, Carlo, Hannah, Raphael, and Juliet.  There are also names that are a bit more unusual or less common like Chosar, Trexie, Jemarie, and Lerma.  Many families in the Philippines seem to like to name children using alliteration, so there have been lots of sibling groups with names all starting with the same first letter like seven kids with all “M” names, six kids with all “J” names. Then there is the fairly common practice of naming twins with the same or very similar first names and different second names like Nina Kylie and Nina Kaye or Marky and Marty with the accent on the second syllable.  

Some of the babies are named after arriving at the shelter because they do not have a name yet. Sometimes, if a child has been abandoned, we do not know the full name and are unsuccessful in finding out the child’s name.  Princess Apple got her name because she was found on a boat bearing that name.  One little boy knew his first name, but not his last name and efforts to find out proved unsuccessful, so he was given the last name of Maxilom for the street where he was found.  One girl told me she liked her name a lot because it was a combination of her birth parents’ first names. 

Names have stories behind them, reasons why a name was chosen for a child.  Our names make us unique.  I wonder what the story is behind Heart’s name. 

Creepy, crawly creatures are everywhere here in this tropical climate.  And everything that crawls seems to come in gigantic versions; big moths, big spiders, big geckos.  The kids (OK it's mostly the boys) are fascinated with bugs and seem to go in seasonal cycles playing with different insects as the bugs hatch and find homes in the vegetation. 

Recently spiders were all the rage with the boys collecting certain kinds and then conducting spider fights on the bristles of brooms.  One day I drove by a large group of school kids at a roadside vendor who was selling something in plastic bags about the size of rulers with something small and black in each bag.  The kids were buying the fighting spiders on their way home from school!

For the last couple of weeks the boys gravitate to the flowering plants as they enter the school gate in the morning.  Praying mantises have been emerging and the kids want to see how many they can find.  They don't use them to fight (thankfully), but are eager to carry the cool looking bugs around during the day. Impromptu mini-science lessons have happened with the appearance of these green creatures like learning that the female mantis eats the head off the male!  

So if you are into bugs, Cebu is the place to be.  Hang out with the kids for a while and you'll learn new and creative ways to play with bugs.