Saturday, January 28, 2012 was a blissful day for 500 poor families in eleven selected barangays of Tacloban City, as they were bound to receive each a bag of goodies from the Metro Bank Foundation, Inc. (MBFI) in celebration of the Chinese New Year. The Project is dubbed as “Bags of Blessing,” which is in keeping with the Metro Bank Group’s corporate social responsibility of providing assistance to the poorest Filipinos nationwide.

At the Rizal Park in the city, officials and employees of the four Metro Bank branches in Tacloban, the Tacloban City Social Welfare and Development Office, and the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) Field Office Eight converged to be able to bring joy to these indigent families. The Philippine National Police was also represented to provide peace and order in the area.

Yvonne Abonales, Technical Assistance Division Chief of the DSWD Eight and speaking for Regional Director Leticia Diokno, bared that the DSWD’s role was to target the recipients for the said project. “ Those who benefited from the ‘Bags of Blessing” project are not the PANTAWID PAMILYA beneficiaries, but other poor families also listed in the DSWD’s National Household Targeting System for Poverty Reduction (NHTS-PR) database,,” Abonales reported.

They come from Barangays 1, 4, 68, 65, 64, 86, 75, 109, 58, 31, 35, and 21, all of Tacloban. Said Federico Mariano, the Area Head of Eastern Visayas of the Metro Bank Group, Tacloban City is lucky enough to be in the list of this year’s Metro Bank’s distribution areas for the project, since the region does not only have a high concentration of branches, but a high magnitude of poor as well.

Mariano added that the Foundation chose to extend donations to 10, 000 poor Filipinos, amounting to a total of Php 10 M, instead of having a party to mark the Chinese New Year.