children's hour

i went to volunteer for the children's hour 'a weekend for the children' at the ayala last weekend. i didn't do much really, i was stationed in a booth selling children's hour caps. the idea was to get people to donate money to the unfortunate kids. in exchange, they can get freebies. you can say it's basically selling stuff, but that's just you. if we get a donation of 200 to 299 pesos, we give the donor a free cap and a chance to choose the cap's color: white or brown.

in my shift (11am to 4pm), my partner and i were able to sell 10 caps. that's some 2000 smackeroos for the kids. right, it's not much. where could a measly 2 grand get the hungry? fortunately, children's hour does not rely on baseball caps alone. there's the company donations (all totalling 2 million last weekend), and all the donations from all the donors' hours.

donors' hours?

you see, the idea works this way: in your regular nine to five job, you can donate an hour of your earnings to the children(hence the name). an hour is really not that much, considering you spend almost an hour a day fixing yourself, eating quick snacks, chatting with co-workers, aimlessly spinning your chair until you puke -- and all these in company time! i don't know about you, but you weren't actually hard at work during this hour.

getting people to donate is really not as easy as it looks. first, you have to smile all the time so people will generally feel that you are a very happy person who is very glad to meet them. after you have acquired their volatile attention with your gleaming white teeth, you then begin the obligatory small talk, "Donate to Children's hour, sir? You could get a cap, you know." After this, you can then wallow in shame and humiliation as people after people nod, refuse, or worse, simply turn away. really, it was embarrassing. but soon, you muster enough confidence, or desensitivity, to do it over and over again.

with all the people i "met" last weekend, i was able to come up with a demographic of people who are most likely to donate money to needy children. it's not the caucasian foreigners, they simply smile at you and move along in a hurry. it's not the asian foreigners, they simply ignore you (it could be in their travel brochures to ignore the locals who attempt to make a conversation). it's not the rich chinese families, they hate delay. it's not even the rich filipino individuals of the hoity-toity sort, they would rather pretend to talk with each other and look at me like a vermin. believe it or not, it's the middle-class filipinos who are most likely to donate. you know, those types of families who go to the malls together in droves, dressed simply in shorts or jeans, without the least pretentions. they listen to what you have to tell them, ask about the project, and then get a kick out of fitting the caps and then annoying each other as to what color doesn't suit them.

proof that when it all boils down to it, only we can look after each other.