CEBU CITY, Philippines —The Cebu City Department of Public Services (DPS) launched on Sunday, July 28, 2019, the food-for-work program for street dwellers and volunteers to help clean-up the city’s rivers.
The program aims to help street dwellers and the jobless make a temporary living by cleaning the rivers in the city.
This way, the city’s waterways are maintained while the street dwellers get food for a day.
Engineer Joel Biton, the DPS head, said that 14 street dwellers from Barangay Ermita helped in the first edition of the program last Sunday, where they cleaned part of the Tinago Creek.
The first food-for-work program gathered 5.3 tons of garbage in exchange of over 100 cans of sardines given to the volunteers.
Biton said the program will continue since the city still has 20,000 boxes of canned sardines that has yet to be distributed. These cans of sardines were left overs of the Basura mo, Sardinas ko program of the previous administration.
Biton said the program has to continue because the sardines were allotted for the volunteers of the program. /bmjo