Jean: Planting Seeds of Hope
14 October 2022<strong>Story by Jamie Gutierrez</strong> <br><strong>Photos by Mahjalin Baldesco</strong>
Jean is a 37-year-old single mother from San Francisco, Southern Leyte. She has three children, two of which are young girls aged nine and ten, and the youngest of which is a 2-year-old boy. Currently, she and her children live together with Jean’s father and siblings.
When Typhoon Rai arrived in the country, she and her children were stranded in San Ricardo, one of San Francisco’s neighboring municipalities. Because of the landslides in the area, they had to wait two weeks before they could return home. Unfortunately, they were welcomed by a severely damaged house and destroyed garden upon their return.
Because Jean’s main source of income was selling harvests from their backyard garden to their community, she lost her livelihood to the typhoon. When she saw that her plants were ravaged by the storm, she felt sad and hopeless because she did not know how she and her family would be able to recover.
Fortunately, Jean was one of Plan International Philippines’ beneficiaries for seeds and gardening tools provided by Japan Platform. “The seeds and gardening tools were a big help because in receiving them, I gained hope that I could support my children again,” she shares.
With the gardening kit, she was able to plant bottle gourd (kalabasa), squash, Malabar spinach (alugbati), sweet potato (kamote), cucumber, ladies’ fingers (okra), eggplant (talong), string beans (sitaw), and Chinese cabbage (pechay).
Jean used the earnings from the garden’s first cycle of harvest to buy the everyday needs of their family as well as necessities for her children including their personal allowance for school. With the success of their newly-restored backyard garden, they are now tending to its second cycle of harvest.
Although Jean says that she still has to repair their damaged house before she can consider themselves fully recovered from the typhoon, she has hope for the future especially with the aid she received from Plan International and Japan Platform. Her wish is for her children to finish their schooling and for the members of her community to have sustainable livelihoods that will help uplift their way of living.
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