2011 | Volunteering Experiences

For five years, it has become my personal habit to join the Hands On Manila’s Servathon as one of their Sherpas. And this year’s event is the largest one to date, 2011 being HOM’s 10th year.

Just a primer: Servathon, coined from the phrase Service Marathon, is an annual HOM event wherein for a half-day, employee-volunteers from 20 or more participating corporations simultaneously render their time and resources to their chosen project for a beneficiary/partner organization. The projects include cleaning up of public parks, painting and refurbishing of public school classrooms, gardening, construction of public restrooms, storytelling, and a lot more. The event culminates with a luncheon program and awarding ceremonies for all the participating corporations.

As Servathon is quite a big event to be handled alone by the HOM staff, they assign volunteers from their pool to each group of corporate volunteers to serve as the group’s Sherpas. These volunteers represent HOM, orienting and coordinating the corporate volunteers onsite about HOM and their project assignments, and ensure they complete their project in the allotted time of about four hours. It can be viewed this way: the corporate volunteers do most of the dirty work; while the Sherpas do some of the errands, documentation, timekeeping and ushering at the culminating program.

For this year’s Servathon, I was assigned to work with the volunteers from Value Quest Securities Corp. at DEOS, Las Piñas City. Their task is to do a mural painting of DEOS’ facade and classroom walls. Joining me as Sherpas were my fellow Better Days volunteers Sierra and Janeth, who were much more excited as it was their first time to join Servathon.

Our Servathon 2011 project site

The Value Quest employee-volunteers

During the pre-Servathon onsite orientation

Sierra, me and Janeth at DEOS

The Value Quest volunteers getting started with the mural painting

The kid volunteers working their way with the classroom walls

A kid volunteer prepares for the handprint painting

Finishing touches at the facade

Finishing touches

As always, it was nice to see the corporate volunteers enjoy the activity, giving life to what used to be plain walls. DEOS volunteers, students and even passersby can’t help but admire the newly-colored facade and classrooms.

After the activity, we then all moved to SMX for the culminating event and lunch. HOM’s celebrity volunteer Marc Nelson again hosted the program, this time with his TARA buddy Rovilson Fernandez. It was a star-studded occasion, with performances from Top Suzara, Markki Stroem and even a surprise number by Diether Ocampo. The most exciting part for me, though, was when my beloved Better Days elderly danced onstage with their Lady Gaga-Wondergirls medley number. I can’t help but feel proud for them, having them perform their award-winning number in front of hundreds of people.