Prisoners reach out to girl stricken with hydrocephalus

By Ramon S. Dacawi

BAGUIO CITY -- Responding to a call for help aired through  television channel ABS-CBN, inmates of the Baguio city jail raised P6,598 which they turned over last Valentine’s Day to the family of a young girl in need.

“It is not the amount but the effort,” an inmate said of the fund drive for Mary Kim Casipit, a four-year old girl stricken with hydrocephaly and whose plight the prisoners learned through an appeal coursed through the TV channel.

To come up with the fund, the inmates, through the male prisoners, set aside P1,000 from their “Tawag ng Tangalan” singing contest last Valentine’s Day, another P1,000 from the senior citizens’ program.

The remaining P4,598 came from a four-day pass-the-hat around the different cells, as the prisoners sustained a program to reach out to the needy beyond the prison walls.

Earlier, the inmates also orchestrated a fund drive for patient Zian Campos Ramos who was diagnosed with leukemia.

In the wake of the devastation wrought by Typhoon Lawin in Kalinga,  the prisoners skipped breakfast for three consecutive days, enabling them to save 12 boxes of noodles, canned goods and three cavans of rice which, together with used clothes, they had delivered to the typhoon-devastated province.  

These outreach programs are the latest in a series of humanitarian gestures that the prisoners have attempted over the years.

Also recently, all of the over 500 inmates, together with their guards, signed a petition launched by patients to make dialysis a free medical service in the country.

The move, which, if approved by the Duterte government, would liberate families with dialysis patients from scrounging for funds to sustain the life-time twice- or thrice-a-week blood-cleansing session of their ailing kin. “It is not the value that counts as long as it comes from the heart,” an inmate said of the latest humanitarian outreach from behind walls.  – With a report from Jerry Pasagoy