What I really love about Ateneo is how important student formation is for them so they give their students opportunities such as Binhi to reach out to those who are less fortunate. My Binhi experience was held at Gawad Kalinga (GK) Bulaklakan where my partner and I were assigned to a foster family and we would just make kwentuhan or hang out with them. I enjoyed it a lot because Ms. Elvie, the host, had 2 cute little kids whom we grew really fond of. They also had three puppies, which the kids showed utter love and care to, and we spent a lot of time playing with them. We talked a lot to our host and asked how she got there in Gawad Kalinga, but mostly we focused our conversation to how her kids are like in school and at home. They’re a simple family who lives in a small house among the many houses that was built there in GK. When I reached their house alongside my partner and the host, it was much better than I had visited before during my immersions. Their house was small yet it was filled with a lot of equipment such as beds, refrigerator, computer, dvd player, television, washing machine and even a ceiling aircon but it was broken when we were there. I think what they value the most is food especially for the host’s all four children, two young ones whom we’ve met and two teenagers we didn’t really get to meet. For mothers, it’s always their top priority to be able to feed their children three times a day, and Elvie is doing her best to do just that every single day from her income as a handler of a laundromat near their house. They seem to value their dogs a lot, they showed utter love and care for the dogs. They also value memorabilias such as photo-framed pictures and medals from her children. For the children, I think they grew up in a humble household because they were really obedient to their parents and nice, a little shy and quiet though. I grew up in a much larger house but the atmosphere I felt when I visited their home wasn’t much different from mine, their place was really homey because it was clean and filled with memorabilias like our own house. We had more equipments than them but their fondness for small tokens or memorabilias reminds me of my own household because we keep those displayed too. Their children were a lot quiet while my siblings and I grew up being really loud and noisy, annoying the neighbors and our maids. That’s another difference, we didn’t grow up cleaning up after ourselves like Elvie’s children because we had our own maids, but when we grew old enough to do chores, we stopped hiring them. We were obedient like Elvie’s children though, especially to our mom because she’s scary when she gets mad. Elvie wasn’t scary to her children, in fact she was very sweet as she kisses her children a lot. Same motherly love, just different personalities. That’s how I would summarize our habitus comparison.
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