Couple filled with love!
There is a saying, that “Where there is heart, there is room in the same household”. This is a good way to describe the “Multi purpose center” in the city of Ozamiz, Philippines. In 2005, some mission organisations bought a house in Ozamiz. The city is located at the north coast of the island called Mindanao, and around 130 000 people live here. The city has been crowned the ugliest and most criminal town in all of the Philippines, but where there is darkness, the light shines even brighter!
The Multi purpose center is full of activities every day. It is a drop in center for street children, where they can get a meal. At daytime the house also serves as a day care center for children that have not yet started school. They learn to read and write, which is a requirement for any child who wants to join school in the Philippines. In the evening, the house is fully occupied. Monday night is bible study time for the children, and Tuesday is bible study time for the grownups. On Wednesdays, the children have their own prayer meeting, and on Fridays they have their youth meeting. On Saturday mornings, they have a bible school there, where they train leaders in the bible, and in the afternoon, they have practice for dancers and singers. On Sundays, they have two sermons. On top of all this, there are 10 children living in the house permanently. All of these are street children that don’t have any other places to be. The older children take care of the younger ones, and all of them have different assignments. In this way, they learn to live their lives in a somehow normal way. The couple in charge of the house is Helen and Joseph, or Jojo which everyone calls him.
Jojo comes from Ozamiz, and he is the youngest out of 5 siblings. One of his older brothers was active in the guerrilla movement that fought against corruption in the government. The problem with this movement was that they took the law in their own hands, and killed their opponents – even the once they only suspected to be corrupt. When Jojo was 13-14 years old, he was invited to help his brother, and Jojo´s assignment was to receive weapons and ammunition at the dock in Ozamiz, and transport it wherever the guerrillas would like. Jojo was nice to have because the police would never expect a kid to be part of the guerrilla. He still had to be careful though; he usually travelled in darkness and used side roads to deliver the risky goods.
Jojo himself thought that he was doing a good deed by helping this way. However, a pastor got to know about what he was doing, and he thought it was too bad for this young man to waste his life like this. He decided to invite Joseph to become a Sunday school teacher in his church. Jojo felt like this was an important task as well and did his work with great eagerness. When he was 16, he moved to the church building, he began at college, and eventually he became leader of the mission work in church. The tasks in church took so much time that he never managed to take his final exams. When he was 22, he married Helen who also was an active member of the church.
Helen had moved to Ozamiz from one of the neighbour islands and joined church because her sister invited her. Her family was very poor; her mother was analphabetic, and her father worked at a sugar factory. In spite of this, her parents knew that the best way out of poverty was to provide school for their children, so school for Helen and her sister was prioritized. Helen wanted to be a nurse, but that was too expensive, instead she educated as a social worker. After she finished her education, she spent a long time without finding a job. Her sister therefore asked if she would like to come to Ozamiz and use her skills in the church there because they had an extensive social work. Helen did that, and from 2004 she has been in charge of a sponsored school program in Ozamiz.
In addition to having three children themselves, Jojo and Helen have opened their family for street children at multi purpose center. In reality, they function as mother and father for the ten children living there. Three of them they have taken the official responsibility for as foster parents.
Jojo and Helen do not seek to be praised. They work quietly, but the work shows great fruits. To many of us, having set hours of work, it is hard to understand how Jojo and Helen can live and work like they do – as full time social workers. They live in the middle of poverty, and they know all too well themselves what it’s like to not have anyone around, or to not have enough food at the table. To be able to see a child that normally no one would take care of being cared for, taken care of, grow up and go to school, is more worth than comfort and a “normal” life.
