Backpacking Landscapes: Aeta Boarding House - Sitio Sagpat, San Felipe, Zambales

Friday, November 10, 2023

Aeta Boarding House - Sitio Sagpat, San Felipe, Zambales

This all started after visiting a nearby waterfall and hearing that kids sleep on the sand. These students are from Sitio Banawen, a neighborhood in the mountains that entails trekking and river crossing and is not a feasible daily trip. There is an elementary school up in the community, but to get to high school, students will have to move to the field; Lucky for those who has relatives there, but with some who has none, they stay on a vacant shanty on a roadside where kids sleep straight on the sand. I did not ask further how the case is when it rains.

This shanty is built next to the roadside, atop a community drainage. The kids sleep on the sand (right side on the picture) and it is disturbing to realize their heads will lay just a foot away from the edge of the road and atop the drainage.

Now, it will be my 40th birthday next year, and thought it will be a good reminder of the time I have existed on the earth if I can do something worth that time.

With the help of a fellow Kakampink Architect (based in Shanghai, China) who I worked with during the campaign, he immediately sent me a design with the specs I have mentioned to him. There was also that friend Kristine in Canada, who has for years, been randomly chatting me to check if there are some community projects that needed funding.

For this project, we are building a 6-10 pax boarding house for Banawen Residents. I have checked with teachers from Banawen, and class sizes are about 10 per grade level. We will look for a land which we can purchase at a reasonable price, so in the future, we will always have the boarding house for the kids and the aeta community up there.

(Update from Dec 04: Most of the land are rocky and slopes, there is one land with an unfinished house we saw but the asking price was P180,000. However, the house is right next to the high school and it is 300 square meters. We might choose this for its convenience for the kids, and also the land size as the parents of these kids usually sleep sunday night with their kids, as they have to be early in the market during mondays and thursday San Felipe Market days where they sell their goods. In this case, we are setting an additional budget of up to 50K for renovation and completion of the house).

The materials cost for the project is around P110,000, and expected labor to be at P55,000, and we're setting a budget of P30,000 for a 50sqm land. Total is P185,000.00.

Here is a google sheet link for the cost. Here is also the google drive folder for the rest of the pics/plan

For the interior and furnishing, we have another kakampink friend Sofia who volunteered to do the total furnishing, including the fundraising. It will be heaven's grace if we have someone who can also work on getting them a sattelite based internet service, which will help not just these kids, but the whole community in general.