This lazy afternoon in Christmas break, I am thinking of playing computer games with my friends. Suddenly I snap back to reality, to find myself over a hundred kilometers away from home, holding a soiled shovel, squinting at the sun while figuring out how to remove a leech sucking blood from my foot.

Then I thought “Why am I feeding leeches when I should be playing and relaxing like most of my friends?” Well, I need to retrace my thoughts to the beginning.

I'm Ian, a 3^rd year High School student from Bacolod City, and I'm currently in the mountainous terrain near Bais City, Negros Oriental along with some professionals and students from other schools. What are we doing here, anyway? We're not really here for a vacation. We're actually here to do some serious community outreach. We are in a six-day Christmas work camp, organized by by Buklod Cultural Center in Bacolod City and Tuburan Study Center in Iloilo City. Charity comes in many forms, and the sort of charity we are offering is through labor. This Christmas, we are here to help the Bais Family Farm School in a way we can. And there is still, of course, the challenge of coming back to our homes in one piece.

So what tasks are we to do? We are to install a fence around the school property and mold cement for a footpath leading from the school to the coffee garden. I am assigned to join the fence-building team, which among others involved fixing posts into the soil near a creek. That is where I was unsuspectingly feasted upon by the leech. I have to say, fence building is a lot harder than I thought! I mean a lot of factors are against us: the weather, terrain, the plants, and the insects. We have two “working weathers” here: either scorching hot or heavy rains that slow down movements and freeze your ears off. The earth here is a;ways wet due to the early morning drizzles, and the vegetation here is really hostile, with all sorts of thorny and spiny weeds which are also home to all sort of insects which get everywhere. I know that coming from far away and putting up with all this sounds like a dumb thing to do, but the thought of how much help it gives makes the trip worthwhile.

Our living quarters during the work camp is the dormitories of the family farm school. Everyday things happened like clockwork: wake up, eat, work, and what not. So what good would this bring the school? Well this school is still starting out and would really need all the help it can get. Its focus is to teach the children of those farmers in the mountains all about good agriculture. The school is non-profit and does not usually ask tuition fees from its students. It gets its fund from the support of some families and farming.

All in all it wasn't so bad, and all the hard work actually paid off. We saw sights we've never seen before, gone to places we've never been through, and of course made friends worth remembering for life.

Ian is an incoming 4th Year Student from Bacolod City, Philippines.