It is the time of the year again for the Thomson Reuters Volunteer for the Community Day. This has been happening annually since 2009 and today is its 4th year celebration.
Employees across all the business units of Thomson Reuters sign-up for the event and choose their beneficiary activity they would join in. The choices were Childhaus, Virlanie, Isang Litrong Liwanag, UP-PAUW, and Kythe Foundation among others.
This is the third time that I have joined the event. Ever since I have become part of the Thomson Reuters family, I immediately grabbed the very first opportunity for me in 2010 to join this celebration. Since then, I have committed myself to engage in the activity every year. In 2010, I joined the Quezon City Circle clean-up of its grounds. In 2011, I helped with the repainting of the school buildings by the UP-PAUW located within the UP Campus.
This year, I chose to be part of the Gawad Kalinga Enchanted Farm house-building and landscaping activities in Angat, Bulacan. As usual, me and my office friends always are together in the same activity.
Named after the place of its origin, Bulacan’s Barangay Encanto—which connotes images of the supernatural and magical in Filipino—the Enchanted Farm is the canvas for Gawad Kalinga’s second phase of the 2024 road map to end poverty in the Philippines. Once idle and unproductive, the area is being transformed into a landscape of vast potential that will sustain communities for generations to come. The first of 24 CSI sites around the Philippines, The Enchanted Farm in Bulacan follows a template that fuses three different concepts. (GK Enchanted Farm website)
The schedule of our voluntary work involved house building, compost pit digging, football field leveling, and garden landscaping. Just with words, we already knew that it wold not be easy tasks especially in the middle of summer with the country burning and scorching in heat.
We left the meeting place in Makati at 6:00 a.m. and we arrived in the farm at 8:00 a.m. We were first oriented and briefed about the GK Enchanted Farm. It was not only the group of Thomson Reuters employees who came there. There were also a lot of other volunteers and support groups scheduled to be in the farm that day.
Our first stop was house building. This was not new to me since I have already volunteered for Habitat for Humanity some years ago to build houses. I helped with the shoveling of sand and gravel to be used for the house's flooring. My other friends helped too with the shoveling while the others helped in leveling the soil to where the cement mix would be poured.
The other members of the group at the same time as us helped with the flattening of the grounds that would be converted to a small football field while the others went to the compost pit site.
The next activity I joined in was the landscaping of the land around GK Enchanted Farm's "palace" which would be a place and reception for future weddings and other functions. We scraped and pulled of the grass around. It was fun even though the heat of the sun burned us and we were soaked in sweat.
The activities ended in midday and we went back to Quezon City to have our culminating activity and recognize all the volunteers who participated. It was another successful day for Thomson Reuters.
