Time off for kids, ‘Yolanda’ village

“Where are your shoes?” Australian triathlete Belinda Granger asked a little boy, one of several kids at a Gawad Kalinga housing project in Bantayan town, north Cebu.

The boy in rubber slippers just shrugged.

On the spot, Granger bent down and took off her blue running shoes to give to him.

“I have one more pair in my bag anyway,” she said, after noticing that other children who greeted the visitors had shoes except this one.

The pair was bigger than the boy’s feet but he smiled widely at the unexpected gift and thanked the blonde lady, one of ten foreign Ironman 70.3 athletes who visited barangay Ticad, Bantayan town.

“To think of how much the sport of triathlon has given to me and how good the people of the Philippines have been to me over the years… it was the least I could do. Thank you for giving me the opportunity,” said Granger, whose photo of her and the boy were later posted on the Ironman page.

After Sunday’s endurance races, organizers and several triathletes took a chartered plane to Bantayan for yesterday’s groundbreaking of 25 GK houses for typhoon Yolanda survivors.

The sale of $30 shirts which read “Humanitarian Philippines Relief Effort” helped the Ironman Foundation raise about P3 million to build the Ironman village.

“In every event that we took the shirts, they just get sold out right away,” said Ironman Asia Pacific CEO Geoff Meyer.

“We wanted to do something close in Cebu because we do come here and race and we’ve felt the Cebuano hospitality. We want to give back to the community,” Meyer said.

Athletes shovelled concreted for the base of a street sign of “Ironman 70.3 Avenue” to mark the row of houses.

Then they got their hands dirty painting walls, mixing concrete and transporting the cement mix.
Among the more active ones was 33-year-old Brent McMahon of Canada who just won the Men’s Pro title after finishing the race under four hours.

“It’s great to be able to enjoy the Philippines by doing the race and then come down here and give back to the country and the area that’s given us such a beautiful place to race,” he said on his second visit to the Philippines.

Recalling the volunteer work he used to do in mission trips to Mexico in his younger days, McMahon said the Bantayan visit was a “great reminder about how rewarding it is to help out those who’ve had traumatic experiences like last year’s typhoon.”

After work, athletes were treated to a Filipino-style “boodle fight” for lunch. They gathered around a long table where food was laid on banana leaves. With bare hands they ate lechon (roast pig), grilled pork and fish, shrimps and chopsuey vegetables and rice.

“It’s a lot of fun. The food was delicious. It was great to really share a meal with the people of the community and your friends,” said McMahon.

There could easily have been 50 athletes on the trip to Bantayan if not for the limited plane capacity, said Wilfred Steven Uytengsu, president of Sunrise Events Inc. and Alaska Milk Corp. CEO.

He turned over a miniature model of the soon-to-rise Ironman village to Cristopert Ocañada of GK’s area coordination team for region 7.

Bantayan folk living within the no-build zone of 40 meters from the coast will be the first beneficiaries of the two-storey houses.

Each house costs P150,000 and three months to build with sweat equity of 400 hours of work of beneficiaries.

Among them is 49-year-old manicurist Lourdes Decantes, who still has a tarpaulin roof in her bamboo shelter in sitio Binawbaw.

She’s put in 300 hours of work so far.

“Maayo unta nga apil ko sa beneficiaries kay delikado gyud amo lugar ron kay dapit sa seawall,” she told Cebu Daily News.

(I hope to be a beneficiary because we live near the sea wall which is dangerous.) The single mother lives with her 14-year-old son.

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TAGS: Ironman, Yolanda