AWH attended a monthly LCPC (Local Council for Protection of Children) meeting on 4/13 and learned that more than half of the birth certificates for the residents of Gulod, barangay Mangas II, Alfonso had not been issued yet. After the meeting, we asked Tess of municipal Civil Registry Office (CRO) the reasons. She explained that many had discrepancies such as misspelling of the names, wrong birth dates, etc. We retrieved 19 negative certificate of birth (document of not having birth certificate) which had been stuck in the process.
Later date we visited Mangas II and collected baptismal certificates for those 19 residents, then proceeded to CRO and checked one by one what the discrepancies are.
Some needed to correct information on baptismal, some needed to change the negative certificates which we had to pay the fees again. Some required voter’s certificates from the election office preceded by certificates of indigent issued by DSWD.
For example, Henry the recovered boy from sickness has no father (deceased). Since his family has no ID of Henry’s father (Tejero), he has to succeed mother’s last name (Mejos) as his parents were not married officially. So we paid to issue a new negative certificate with the corrections. So his name will be Henry Mejos from now on instead of Henry Tejero. It affected entire his family including his sisters and a child of one of his sisters.
Since Gladis who is one of the resident there and volunteers to handle this project ran out of transportation money, we have provided her enough fund to follow up on this issue including her husband’s papers which need to be forwarded from Samar by LBC.
In the meantime, Dindo, the electronic technician in Alfonso, wanted to volunteer by seeing our activities posted on my Facebook and helped our project in Mangas II. We picked up trash in the area with children and he spent his own money to buy snacks for the kids at his own will.
