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"It was Michael who thought of the concept," Efren recalls. "He was the one who did the shelves, the built-in blackboard." They stocked the pushcarts with books, pens, tables and chairs and this gave birth to the "pushcart classroom," where they replicate a school setting every Saturday in the most unlikely places like the cemetery and the municipal trash dump.
This year, the pushcart classroom has a total of 350 enrollees in four sites, with kids with ages ranging from 2 to 14 learning the basics of counting, reading and writing. The group hopes to bring the "pushcart classroom" into the roads of Manila soon. However, their good deeds are constantly met with challenges.
"We came to a point where we almost gave up," Efren shares, adding that it was his mentor from Club 8586 who kept encouraging them. "He said,’Why would you be ashamed of doing something you know is right?’"
So Efren and his team pursued their cause more passionately. Efren’s determination was further cemented when he met Cris Valdez, a six-year-old orphan boy whose arms and back got badly burnt when he accidentally fell into burning tires during a scavenging hunt at the city dump site.
Now 10 years old and in Grade 4, Cris volunteers as a hygiene and first aid demonstrator. From January to November, Efren relates how Cris earns money, selling candies at his school, and saves the money to buy slippers for streetkids come Christmas time. Cris has even formed his own group, Aklat Para sa Lahat, with 15 kids of the same age. For this, he got recognized as well and was featured recently in Jessica Soho, Kapuso Mo, together with the Dynamic Teen Company. This certainly gave the group good publicity.
However, exposure and spreading awareness to their noble cause and not publicity were the two things in Efren’s mentor’s mind when he filmed the group’s "pushcart classroom" activities one Saturday and uploaded the video in youtube.com. Efren’s mentor believed that the Internet was a good way to let others know of their cause so they can reach out to even more kids in need. It didn’t take long for the video to catch attention worldwide. Eventually a staff member from Oprah’s Angel Network, a website inspired by respected daytime TV host Oprah Winfrey, found out about it. As a result, Efren’s story was featured on the site. In December 2008, someone from CNN got wind of Efren and his group’s efforts and got in touch with them, suggesting that they submit Efren’s story for CNN Hero of the Year.
