ICM: News - HK’s Richest Lend Hand to Help RP’s Poorest

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HK’s Richest Lend Hand to Help RP’s Poorest
Inquirer By Blanche Rivera
March 6, 2007

Hong Kong provides 99 percent of the funding for the ICM. Three churches -- Evangelical Community Church, The Vine and Faith Community Church -- are supporting the group’s feeding, medical and livelihood programs.

A handful of individuals in Hong Kong each donate at least US$50,000 a year to the ICM. There is but one donor in Manila.

“It’s humbling how these people are helping our poor. You wish more Filipinos would do the same for their own people,” said Hong Kong-based Filipino Daphne Ceniza-Kuok, who has pledged to support pre-schools this year.

Invitation ignored

Kuok and another Filipino, Jovi Zalamea, vice president of Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong, tried to host a dinner once for Philippine government officials and other private individuals to introduce the ICM but the invite was ignored.

“It was very difficult to get them involved,” Kuok said.

It was lot easier to partner with local churches though. Since 1993, ICM has worked with over 1,000 churches in Negros Oriental and Occidental, Bohol, and Mindanao who choose the 25 poorest families in their area as beneficiaries of the ICM’s feeding program.

These poor families are given four kilos of rice every week to supplement their food needs. Mothers are given emotional and spiritual counseling, health education and some livelihood start-up for six months, after which the local church takes over the program.

Last year alone, the ICM distributed four million doses of medicines and 580,000 lbs of rice. It also conducted 1,300 open-air clinics last year, according to Tan.

The ICM employs 150 full-time staff in the Philippines and continues to train pastors and church workers in counseling and health care.

“The heroes are the ones who have given their lives to helping others, not the Hong Kong people. We just provide money,” Sutherland said.

“We have a commitment to keep the organization in indigenous capacity, keep it run by Filipinos for Filipinos,” he said.

RP’s 2nd largest slum

Unknown to many, Bacolod has the second largest slum community in the Philippines, the Banago Riverside. In a place where sugar barons have continued to resist land reform, more than half the city’s 500,000 population are still considered squatters, according to the local government.

“The poverty they live in is overwhelming,” said Sutherland’s wife Deanna, who goes house to house in the slums when she visits the partner churches.

“It’s surreal,” she said. “You think, ‘how do people live like this?’ It’s different from the world we live in, but there’s compassion. These are people. It could be me there,” she said.

Such eye-opener is something the ICM shares with Hong Kong’s sheltered, well-heeled people during “vision trips.” The weekend trips, done three to four times a year, takes curious individuals to the slums being supported by the ICM.

“A lot of people who come are financially secure and have never been to anything like this, and yet they have this curiosity and feeling that they owe something back to the world and they don’t know what to do about it. That’s why it’s called a vision trip,” Sutherland said.

Special medical cases

“We’re not pretending that you’re going to do much for these people. It’s almost tourism, but people come back very compelled… They see a part of life that they’ve never seen before,” he said.

Australian banker Harry Turner and his wife Julie, who does a lot of administrative work for ICM in Hong Kong, were among those who have been moved by such exposure.

Coming from Australia where there is not much poverty and then moving to Hong Kong, where there is “overwhelming excess” for expatriates, the Turners were jarred by what they saw.

There was a teener who had no anus, a five-year-old girl who had a stick in her eye and whose eyeball was almost popping out of its socket, and a 16-year-old whose face had been burned when her father threw a kerosene lamp at her.

All of them were special medical cases supported by the ICM. They have all undergone surgery to correct their conditions. The ICM is still looking for more partner doctors and health care workers who could offer their services pro bono.

A dose of reality

Deanna said parents who go on vision trips usually take their children with them -- kids who spend their Saturdays in exclusive clubs and for whom lunches at Shangri-La hotels are ordinary -- to give them a dose of reality.

Turner, who sits on the ICM board, said one reason he and his wife got involved was to give their kids a level of reality, to encourage them to grow up with hearts for the poor.

“So many kids grow up safe and secluded. It’s not that they haven’t got a heart; it’s just that they haven’t got a clue,” the Macquarie Bank Ltd. division director said.

“They have no exposure, and no exposure means no concern, no care, no compassion. But if you’re exposed, you respond in some way,” he said.

Expansion

The ICM is set to spend US$1 million for its programs this year, and is looking at expanding to Cebu or Iloilo.

“The challenge for us in Hong Kong is to expand our creative ways to raise funds because the ministry is becoming bigger,” said Turner, who visited the Tiboli tribe in General Santos City in January.

The Sutherlands, who fly to the Philippines at least four times a year, have seen how the ministry has grown, noting with every visit how women who had been despondent six months ago, now receive them with a smile.

“They are changed because they have found a home, a community. They have built relationships with each other,” Deanna said.

But it turns out, the poor are not the only ones helped.

Turner quipped: “The Philippines is an extraordinary country, with a level of extremes… We go there hoping to serve and come back thinking we’re the ones who’ve been helped.”

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