Volunteering with Dump Children in the Philippines.

Project Overview

By volunteering with the children at the dump, volunteers will get the opportunity to not only participate in one of VFV’s most rewarding outreach projects, but will also help contribute to making long term actions to remove more children from working inside Tacloban City Dump.

Scavenging for plastics and other recyclable items at the city dump is a grim reality of life for many children in our community. Most of these children are malnourished. A few attend school off-and-on, while the rest do not attend school at all. The children – some as young as five – work at the city dump to supplement their parents’ meager earnings. On a good day, a child typically earns about 75 cents, enough perhaps to enable the family to have a second meal that day. The work is hard and dangerous, and the stench of decaying material permeates the area. Still, the children play gleefully on the mounds of compacted garbage while awaiting the arrival of the next dump truck. Like other children in the Philippines, they are playful. This is the only life they know. Yet, should the children remain at the dumpsite, they face a grim future.

In 2005 VFV initiated outreach services to these children through the initiation of its Dumpsite Project. We worked with the Philippines Department of Labor and Employment on livelihood projects, and we continue to collaborate with stakeholders to address this critical problem. Currently, VFV provides incentives, including food subsidies, meals and school supplies, to motivate the children to leave the dumpsite and attend school. VFV monitors the children’s progress and works with their parents to strengthen family functioning. We would like to enroll more of the dumpsite children in our program, where they can receive additional services, but we need more donors to do this.

This year, we are supplementing our ongoing dumpsite kids project with a school break (April to June 2011) activity program. Volunteers will help to organize and conduct recreational and educational activities which will provide incentives for children to remain outside of the dumpsite.

Whilst our long term plan is to completely remove our children from the dump, some of the kids occasionally choose to return their to help supplement their families income. Whilst this is not ideal, unfortunately our staff cannot be present at the dump every second of the day, which is why it is often incredibly beneficial to have the support of volunteers.

Aside from working with the kids already enrolled on our project, the volunteers will help VFV staff systematically monitor the activity of other children in the dumpsite, will help conduct surveys and assessments as part of our long term efforts to fully eradicate children from working in the dump.

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