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Assistant Secretary Lucentales (L) w/ Mayor Ang (R) during the unveiling of the CSAP marker at Barangay Binolo-ac.Gracing the turn-over and inauguration rites of two Core Shelter Projects (CSAP) Thursday, June 17, in San Isidro town of Leyte province, Assistant Secretary Ruel Lucentales of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), expressed deep appreciation for its lot owners who donated pieces of their properties for the realization of said shelter projects, thus benefitting some twenty beneficiaries rendered homeless by Typhoon Frank in year  2007.

“They are also poor,” he said in his inspirational talk, referring to Luis Binolo-ac of Sitio Binolo-ac in Barangay Daja Diot, and Feliciano Aporbo of Barangay San Jose, adding that despite their poverty, they wholeheartedly shared their pieces of land for the good of all.

Further, Lucentales who is also the Coach Monitor for Region Eight, told all the beneficiaries present – “if not of your sincere desire to help each other, you will not participate in development work.  The Core Shelter Project is not about building houses, but building communities.  We help you build your homes, you help build your community.”

The visiting official exhorted beneficiaries to “safeguard your community against crime, and ensure that there would be no violence in every home.”  He later emphasized that the shelter project is an assurance that no beneficiary will lose his home, and that such will help restore their dignity.

Binolo-ac, for his part, stood up and told beneficiaries “when I donated, I never hoped of these houses.”  The core shelter unit is a structural typhoon-resistant one, costing P 70,000.00 each, from funds of the DSWD.  However, the project demands counterparts of local government units and beneficiaries themselves for the rest of the requirements and works of the project.

Meanwhile, Virginia Idano, chief of the Operations Division of DSWD Field Office Eight which is being headed by Regional Director Leticia Corillo, said the province donated P10,000.00 for each unit; the municipal government under Mayor Allan Ang, P5,000.00 per unit; Provincial Social Welfare and Development Office, rice and sardines for the beneficiaries involved in the construction (thru food-for-work scheme); and the DSWD, P200.00 as daily cash incentive for the 20 beneficiaries involved in the project, for a period of ten days.

Idano bared that San Isidro has already 88 shelter units since the time the program was implemented in the municipality in 2004, aside from the 20 structures that were newly-completed.