Zxandy's Christmas Eve Food Distribution Event

Joelet's sister Joy Ann lives with us. We have cared for her daughter for 2.5 years now while she worked in Manila. Her daughter's name is Jann Zxavier, Zxandy (ZAHN-day) for short. A good kid, normal intelligence - perhaps a bit higher than average. But she is introverted, does not talk much. None of us are trained in such things but we try to give her opportunities to branch out without being overly pressuring.

This Christmas Eve, we pooled our money together and bought a bunch of cheeseburgers from a Jollibee franchise here in Balayan. For my US folks, I put Jollibee a step and a half below McDonalds or Burger King, but the people here like it. We negotiated a bit of a discount and also procured fruity drinks and candy.

At the barangay across town, preparing.

Balayan is not a well-to-do town, to put it politely. And being sequestered during this covid period does not help. Kids who go to public school do not have the opportunity for online distance learning. The moms have to go to the school each day and pick up the assignments. Zxandy goes to parochial school and does online learning. 

For this event, we tried to have Zxandy lead the way as much as possible. She talked to Jollibee, handled the money, took delivery of the goods. You will notice in the video above that her Mom and Tita (auntie) Joelet are doing a lot of the driving, though. Hopefully this will lead to other opportunities.

Masks and social distancing are taken very seriously here. They have to, if the pandemic got out of control, the health care system here would be quickly and completely overrun. The barangay (translates roughly to 'neighborhood') officials in the pink shirts assisted us but some of these kids don't even have masks. I don't know all their situations but this was a good thing we were able to do for them.

Photography note:  With the exception of the last image (taken with Nikon J5), the above video and stills were all taken with the DJI Osmo Action camera. It does not handle wide-angle distortion in stills as well as it does in video, so . . . .