Morse High raises $1,470 for Philippine typhoon relief

By Jacinda Hernandez
Morse Code newspaper

After Typhoon Haiyan struck the central Philippines on November 7, 2013, many Morse students and staff members had the immediate urge to help the victims by raising money and donating essential items to the victims.

Coincidentally, the same week as Super Typhoon Haiyan happened it left many people being homeless, the Week of Consciousness whose main focus for the week was homelessness was also occurring. The club organization thought that doing something for the typhoon would be a great way to incorporate the idea of homelessness and connecting it to their cause.

Junior Ashley Carbonell, a member of One World, described the hardships of trying to organize two different causes in one week and how easy it was to get people involved with the Philippine cause. One cause was for the homeless population on campus and the other was the homeless victims struck by the super typhoon.

“I think that the hardest part was making the decision to finalize our plan with the ideas that we had thought of,” said Carbonell. “We had ideas of creating shirts and rubber bracelets, but because of the time crunch we ended up just placing donation money boxes in multiple classrooms across campus and allowed students to drop off donation items at a few classes.”

Choosing a good, credible, and trustworthy charity is hard to find, which was one of the dilemmas that One World had to face. One World made the decision to work with an organization called Gawad Kalinga a.k.a GK. Gawad Kalinga means to “give care.” One World worked with GK to help raise money with many donation boxes distributed to multiple classrooms. All of the money from the donation boxes would then be given to the typhoon victims in the Philippines.

Arlene Benedicto, AP U.S. History and AP Psychology teacher, made a decision with her husband to match however much money was in the donation box. At the end of the week, her classrooms donation box had well over $100 packed inside.

“In just one week Morse raised $1,470 and had about eight carloads of donation items. This was in addition to the 10 boxes of goods already collected before last Friday,” said Benedicto. “The money donated to Gawad Kalinga was enough to buy 294 food packs that will feed a family of four for three days.”

Junior Rejeanne Devera participated in helping the Philippines by donating her clothes and money.
“I donated four shopping bags worth of my old clothes, most of them I never even wore before,” described Devera. “I felt awesome giving things away that’ll be of more use for others.”

“My family was fortunately unaffected by the typhoon, but I’m giving my best regards to those who were,” said Devera.

This heartbreaking time for the Philippines has shown that the students and teachers on campus are caring and thoughtful, we managed to raise lots of money and a lot of goods that the victims no longer have and it is what they need to survive.