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14th December 2005
I got together with all the students of Pulao Elementary for their Christmas party on the 14th of December.

Preparations
A few days before the party, the whole class drew names from a hat to decide who would buy a present for whom. I drew the teacher, Mme. Canque. I got her a king size bar of Cadbury chocolate. I chose the chocolate because it is made in Dunedin, New Zealand. The factory in Dunedin is walking distance from the place where I used to work.

The students were all very curious about whom I had drawn, but it was a secret draw so I couldn't tell them. I think that they all secretly wanted it to be them. So as not to disappoint anyone, I decided to buy presents for all of them. I tramped off to one of the malls in Iloilo city and bought them each a notebook and a pen.

I have been giving special tutoring classes to the three brightest mathematic students. They have a math competition in early January and I have been honing their skills. Part of the competition requires them to measure angles using a protractor. None of them had a protractor, so I gave them each a protractor in addition to the other gifts.

I arrived home in Tabucan with a big heap of books, pens, protractors, wrapping paper and tape. Eden and some other locals helped me wrap the presents.

I wrote special messages to the students on the inside cover of their notebooks. A typical sort of message went something like this:

Dear Lester,
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Knowledge is a very powerful weapon. Learn to wield it and you can do great things for your family, your country and yourself. Great people such as Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton had ideas that changed the world.

I will be back in The Philippines one day. If I bump into you, I expect to find a confident young man who has truly valued education and is doing great things.

Go Hard!

Sir Malcolm

The Big Day
The Big Day finally arrived. Unfortunately, there was a torrential downpour the night before and so the school had to have a bit of a cleanup. The water on the concrete was swept away and the litter picked up.

Each of the classes had to prepare an item. Grade 5 performed a song, the name of which temporarily eludes me... All the other grades performed a dance number, pictures of which can be found here.

Meghan and Gez, the other volunteers at the school, helped Grade 6 put on a Christmas play. The whole play was done without a microphone due to technical problems, which was a bit of a shame really, as this meant 95% of the audience couldn't hear what was said.

Eatings
I had promised the students that I would bring them some ice-cream to have with their lunch. With The Philippines being as hot as it is, there was just no way that I could of bought it with me in the morning. I had to leave school and head back in town just before lunch.

Romel, one of the grade five students, came with me to give me a hand. We got three, four-litre tubs of ice-cream for 600 pesos ($NZ 15.00). If ice-cream has little bits of chocolate and stuff in it, I consider it to be a top quality ice-cream. This was top quality ice-cream. I wish I could get this sort of ice-cream as cheap in New Zealand...

Romel also helped me get some fruit from the market. Angie, another volunteer, lent me her ice-box. We packed the ice-cream and some ice into her ice-box and headed back.

I told Romel that we should play a trick on the students. I told him to say that we couldn't get any ice-cream and we had to get goat meat instead. Romel was all for the idea. Romel dutifully told the students and I backed him up. Rather surprisingly, they actually believed me! Some of the poor wee mites look utterly crestfallen.

I asked one of the students to check to see if the goat meat was ok. There was a deafening roar when he opened the icebox... They were just so happy. Most of them are under-weight and probably haven't had ice-cream in a long time. It made me feel good to make them that happy. 600 pesos well spent.

Romel, the student who helped me fetched the ice-cream got a little upset. He has asthma and couldn't eat any of the food. He could only have rice. He was especially upset about not being able to have any ice-cream. I let him listen to my i-Pod to cheer him up a bit. Poor little bugger.

Present Time
All the presents were stacked together on a central table. The teacher gave her present to her random student. The recipient would then approach the table and give their present to their random recipient, and so on. Christmas carols were spontaneously sung while all this was going on.

When the final present had been handed out, I stopped proceedings and announced that I had a present for everyone. Another deafening roar ensued...

Silly Games
Some silly games were also played. Pairs of students blindfolded each other and then tried to feed their partner a banana. Suitably hilarious frivolity ensued.

The Day After
The Christmas party was on the Wednesday. Thursday and Friday were still official school days and the students were supposed to attend.

On Thursday, there was about 5 or so students present in the whole school and 3 teachers.

The students that I had been giving special mathematics lessons to were among the ones that bothered to turn up. This gave me another opportunity to tutor them and show them how to use their protractors.

Aww, that's nice
Some of the students made me thank you cards. I appreciated them so much. Some of my favorites can be found here.

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(c) 2005 and 2006 Malcolm Trevena.
All the stuff on this site is written by me, Malcolm Trevena. Feel free to link to this page. Heck, you can even copy stuff from here if you want. Just make sure you sight me as a reference.

Christmas Party at Pulao Elementary