My name is Loida, I am a Filipino and a widow. I've been working here as a cleaner for flats and condos for 6 years now. I am staying in Relau where most of the migrants are also renting. That's why I know a lot of them. Most of my co-workers as a cleaner were also migrants of different nationalities. When Carmena learned that I knew a lot of migrants in our Relau area, she tapped me to be the contact person for all of them every time their Migrant Ministry has an outreach wherein they distributed foodstuffs to migrants during Lenten and Advent season. My place became a distribution site during those times when Peter and Andre, and sometimes Wai Queen sent me bulks of foodstuffs for several weeks during their outreach. I sorted them out and divided them for a number of migrants.

When the pandemic came, some migrants came to my place asking if they could get help for food again from the church as most of them had lost their jobs and for some of them, their working place was temporary closed due to MCO. So I called Carmena and told her about the problem of the migrants, and she said that she will check with the church if she can ask some help for the migrants.

It was June 25 when the first batch of food aid for 6 people came. After that, a lot of migrants started to approached me to have their names listed so they could also receive some foodstuffs. Word of mouth had spread so fast that even migrants from different places had been sending me their names and personal details just to qualify for the food aid. Week after week, Zac and his team delivered food aid to the migrants living around Relau.

Until now, Zac and his team have been constantly sending the migrants who are still out of work foodstuffs every Sunday. Aside from the Sunday deliveries, they are also sending them boxes of fresh vegetables on Wednesdays and some cooked food from CDM that Peter is also sending.

My cellphone had always been very busy in receiving messages for those requesting to be included in the list of recipients, and also sending them messages on when they could receive the food aid. I have a lot of good and bad experiences in helping the migrants. The good ones are when they express their appreciation of getting some help from our church even though most of them have different religion. They also thank me personally for my sacrifices in helping them, and they realize that I am also spending some cellphone load in communicating with them whenever there is a delivery especially of the cooked foods and veggies. My bad experiences are when they try to fool me on still asking to be listed when they had just received foodstuffs a few weeks ago. Sometimes, they message me using a different phone number so that they would appear to be a different person. But I still feel good and grateful that I had been given the opportunity to help my co-migrants in my little way.

Translated and edited by:

Carmena Olarte