Science Lab Revamp at Pinagala-an

Birthday presents for Pinagala-an ! The head teacher Ferdinand Buque and volunteer teacher  Mr Tambili with some maps, watercolour paints, and educational posters we donated to the school.

This year on my birthday (6th December) Bill and I went to Pinagala-an to deliver some science equipment and other goodies to the children.  Bill and I had spent the previous weekend in Davao, which is about six hours away down in the south of Mindanao, in order to source and buy the more specialist items the school teachers had requested. 

One of the tougher things to find was a microscope.  The school’s existing microscope had been unusable for at least two years, a source of great concern to the head teacher as he is also the science teacher for the school.

An excited head teacher assembles the new school microscope. 

We are really keen to promote the teaching of science as you will probably have seen on the TV the devastating effects that deforestation are having in the Philippines, with whole villages being swept away by landslides and all the ocupants of those villages being killed.  Even in the area where I work there are regular landslips.  So quite apart from the environmental reasons, there is an urgent need to raise children’s awareness of the importance of managing thier environment in a more sustainable (and safer) way to prevent loss of life as well as destruction of the environment. 

Anyway, after a lot of hunting we eventually sourced a suitable microscope from a medical supplies shop within the Davao Doctor’s Hospital.  To this we added a pack of glass microscope slides, a box of coverplates and half a dozen magnets (another request from the teachers !) – including bar magnets and horseshoe magnets.  Not sure why magnets are available in a medical supplies shop, but they were ! Later on we even found educational posters about microscopes and about magnetism, to create a complete set !  The head teacher Mr Burqe was really impressed by that, and kept saying how complete it all was !

     

Bill and Head teacher Mr Buque with the microscope, magnets and posters. 

These were not the only educational posters we bought – there were a whole heap of them, as well as which every classroom got a world map and a map of the Philippines. 

Finally, we added loads of trays of watercolour paints since this is something the school has trouble affording to buy for themselves, and there is no way the individual children could provide their own – they just couldn’t afford to do so.   So or the time being art classes can take on a new lease of life !

We handed over the stuff and were about to leave for Butuan (as Bill had to fly home the next day) when all  the children appeared in front of me and started singing me really lovely birthday tunes. 

 

The children singing birthday songs to me !

It was not just a simple ”Happy Birthday to You” but several lovely and quite complicated birthday songs which were obviously well rehearsed, and all about ‘ your can hear all your sons and daughters are singing to you’ and ‘ today must be so much happier than yesterday since its your birthday‘  and ‘we are so happy god has given you one more year’.    Lovely, and very touching !

 

I am suddenly innundated by flowers – which are locally grown by the parents of the children for sale in local markets.

During the singing I noticed some of the children holding flowers, and was a bit suspicious about this, and sure enough at the end of the singing I was swamped in flowers.  Cut flowers are one of the major things grown by local farmers (but in a very subsistence-farming type way), so although the local people are so poor they have very little which they can give, they gave me the one thing they had – flowers.  And they gave them in abundance – a veritable tidal wave of flowers ! Very generous and moving. 

I certainly went home with a little tear of emotion in my eye after all their efforts to mark my birthday (and so did Bill – he was about to tease me when he realised he also had a tear in his eye !). 

A truly memorable birthday indeed.