Dr. Jun Samar of Cavite is helping lessen COVID-19 infection cases by supplying food to families so they do not have to leave their homes while under community quarantine to stop the spread of coronavirus disease.
Dr. Samar announced that his empathic relief program, a food donations program for Cavite neighborhoods, has currently reached its ninth wave.
After noticing that some neighborhoods weren’t able to get their rations from local government units (LGUs), Dr. Samar and his peers have been conducting a relief program in Cavite neighborhoods. For each wave, they distribute food donations to families in need for five days. For the eighth wave alone, they reportedly assisted about 170 families.
The doctor recalls he first began servicing twenty families with food packs bought out of his own pocket, then soon got support from close friends, old classmates, medical colleagues, and better-off neighbors. He receives goods like food more often than monetary contributions.
On the 7th wave, he decided to tap local bakeries to assist in food distribution, while providing bags of fresh pandesal to families under the program.
On his Facebook, Dr. Samar says that he isn’t being generous for his self-righteousness but out of compassion – in fact, he wears his full Protective Personal Equipment gear to remain anonymous on the job.
“That’s why I post on Facebook: to encourage others to do the same in the community,” Dr. Samar says, adding that if every community in the country had one mover, it would make this difficult time more bearable.
Dr. Jun Samar’s relief program has had positive feedback from the families he assisted and his blog and YouTube videos have had humorous engagement. He’s even received charming fanart much to his delight.
When asked about why he’s called himself a backliner on his Facebook blog, he answers that the frontline refers to the medical facilities, but the backline refers to the community.
“Cases going to the frontline comes from the community. Unrest in the backline will produce more COVID cases [for] the frontline. We need to help the backline to lessen cases of the frontliners, so helping my community is my contribution as a backliner.”
Compassionate “movers” elsewhere in the Philippines include a parish priest in Camarines Sur who uses the church vegetable garden to feed the townspeople during the community quarantine and an Ilocano teacher who feeds his needy students with vegetables from his garden and fish harvested from his pond.
SEND CHEERS in the comments below to Dr. Jun Samar for feeding the families on lockdown so they do not have to leave their homes and risk COVID 19 infection.
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