Don’t be like me.

Don’t be someone whose life revolves around Zara sales and internet porn and comic books and fastfood pizza and bottomless Tang Strawberry Juice.

Don’t be helpless and impotent and indifferent in the face of real social issues.

Be like Zarah.

Be someone who cares enough to step outside of the trappings of the corporate world to do more than donate funds to faceless charities.

Be someone who spends her Saturdays actually immersed in the Bayan ni Juan community located in far-flung Calauan, Laguna to do developmental work with the kids who live there. There are thousands of them, mostly relocatees from the Typhoon Ondoy calamity, and have owned even less in their lifetimes than some of us more fortunate people  have spent on clothes and bags and Starbucks coffee in one day. They are the poorest of the poor, the ones who get swept under the rug when progress calls.

Zarah gives them everything she has to give. She reads them stories. She teaches them songs of hope. She coaches them through their dance routines. She teaches them value formation. She laughs with them, she plays with them, she chases them out of despair and desolation. She’s a saint to them, and they love her incredibly.

Even if she can be a machine-gun-toting bad-ass sometimes..

As do I. I just stand on the sidelines and help carry stuff and treat the kids to piggybacks and play basketball with them on their rudimentary street courts. But I marvel at the selflessness and soul and strength and spirit that she finds within herself to share so much to these people, even as she lives her weekday life as a full-time mommy and corporate prodigy.

We try to go there every Saturday. It’s hot, dirty, sweaty work, but we love it incredibly. We always go home smelling of soil and filth, but with huge smiles on our faces and our hearts as light as jazz.

But I wish I could do more.

One thing these kids haven’t got is a school. Zarah’s dream, which she shares with her partners in her development work, is to fund a mobile school for them, which will be run by Salesians of Don Bosco. It will cost PhP2-million, which is a lofty dream for one person to bring to life, but not for ten, a hundred, a thousand good souls working together.

These kids have been stuck in generations of poverty. But they never stop hoping and dreaming of elevation. This is one concrete way that they can escape the downtrodden cycle they have navigated thus far.

Can you help?

Contact Zarah Hernaez, +63 928 304 3267.

And watch this video. These are the faces behind the hope that we feel.

Be a Superstar and help fight for the future.

(And yes, that’s Zarah singing. She’s amazing.)