Shoving off at Siargao’s Port Del Carmen, the small yellow pamboat slides across the silky morning waters as if on a mission. Which, in fact, it is. For crammed aboard that craft are six teachers making their weekly hour-long pilgrimage to the island of Caub, where several hundred students eagerly await their arrival at a rural barangay school.
On one level, the trip is a miracle. “Yellow Boat is a very great help,” head teacher May Shiela Agad admits. “We couldn’t do this without it.”
She’s talking about the Yellow Boat of Hope Foundation, an angelic nonprofit group based in southern Mindanao that has spread its enabling wings—or should I say paddleboards—across the entire Philippines. More specifically, across its children, schools, teachers, islands and the painfully wide expanses of ocean separating them.
In the beginning, it was just about getting kids to school.
That was back in 2010, when a friend told Dr. Anton Lim, a practicing veterinarian in Zamboanga City, a story he couldn’t believe. Crowds of young children, initially mistaken for floating garbage, had been seen swimming to school holding plastic bags over their heads to keep their supplies and uniforms dry.
“I was skeptical,” Lim, 59, told the Sunday Times Magazine. “I thought it was a scam.”
Then he visited the nearby Sama-Bajau island village in question to discover the truth. And what he found there changed his life. Seeing those half-naked youngsters in the water, Lim said, “really broke my heart. I couldn’t imagine my own kid swimming to school.”
And so, he decided to do something about it. Working with Jay Jaboneta, the friend who’d alerted him to the sad spectacle in the first place, Lim spoke to the village elders. “At first they were suspicious,” he remembers. “I listened to them and their suggestion was very simple; give us a boat, they said, and we will take care of ourselves.”
And that’s how the project began. Lim and Jaboneta raised money for the construction of a boat big enough to carry 25 kids, and the village elders were ecstatic. “For 10 years we’ve been praying to Allah for help,” one said, “but our prayers were not heard. Now you’re here and Allah has answered our prayers. This boat is more than just a boat. It is new hope for us.”
So that’s what they called the nonprofit foundation they founded; Yellow Boat of Hope, for which Lim now serves as president and CEO. The color of the boats, both in name and hue, comes from the traditionally yellow school buses common in the United States and other developed countries.
“Our boats are like school buses on water,” the yellow boat guru explains.
It soon became apparent, however, that just one boat wouldn’t suffice. The kids complained that waiting for a single boat to pick everyone up made them late for school. Other tribes living nearby clearly needed boats of their own. And, aside from providing transportation to and from school, the boats were obviously essential for such family tasks as fishing and transporting rice.
“That’s what opened my eyes,” Lim says, to the reality “that the boats were not just for kids.” Thus began the earnest boat-building efforts that, to date, have resulted in more than 5,000 boats nationwide. And, yup, every one of them is yellow.
Building that many boats, of course, requires money. The campaign to raise it began with a Facebook post by Jaboneta showing lots of kids in the water. It went viral, and the donations started pouring in. These days, according to Lim, the Yellow Boat of Hope Foundation receives anywhere from 15 to 20 million pesos per year in donations. About 70% of it, he says, comes from Filipinos—mostly in the US or other countries—and the rest from foreigners throughout the world including Singapore, India, Russia, Germany and Switzerland, to name just a few.
“We get money from wherever there are Filipinos,” he says, “and that means everywhere.” The foundation also received a $50,000 boost last year from the Public Interest Registry, a US-based nonprofit that recognized Yellow Boat with its annual .ORG Impact Award for its “contributions, achievements, and impact” on the communities it serves.
And, indeed, those communities have ample need. In 2023, according to the foundation, 18% of the five-to-24-year-olds in the Philippines were not attending school. That’s nearly one in five—or 7.9 million—school-age children and young adults missing out on their educations. The reasons include lack of interest, financial struggles, and, of course, limited access to schools. “Our mission,” Lim says, “went from getting kids to school fast, safe, and dry to making sure that no child gets left behind.”
Over the years, Yellow Boat has developed a multi-pronged approach to achieving that goal. To date, Lim says, the foundation has adopted 300 recipients nationwide—roughly half of them schools and the other half communities—to benefit from its ongoing projects. Besides providing boats, those projects have included building schools, classrooms, dorms, and even concrete bridges. The foundation also provides scholarships, school supplies, meals, laptops, printers, solar lighting, and internet connections. As well as easing the livelihoods of fishermen, farmers, boat builders, and tour guides.
The overall results throughout the country so far: 5,375 boats, 13 school buildings, five dormitories, 15 new and 23 repaired classrooms, two bridges, 59 educational hubs, and three community learning centers.
“Our goal,” Lim insists, “is to help entire communities.”
One community helped rather dramatically, he says, is the Sama-Bajau tribe of Sitio Teheman on the southern island of Basilan. Seafaring Muslims who traditionally live on boats and earn their livings from fishing and weaving, the so-called “sea gypsy” children were having difficulty adjusting to their new lives as students at the local public school.
“They would stay a couple of days or weeks and then drop out,” Lim reports. “They were bullied, couldn’t catch up with their classmates, and couldn’t even write their names.”
All of which was made even more difficult by their parents’ constant need for their help at home. Not to mention the concrete land-based school buildings alien to their experience and culture.
So Yellow Boat of Hope stepped in to save the day. First, it built a separate school for the Sama-Bajau children constructed of familiar unintimidating wood standing on stilts over water. Then it peopled that school with teachers of the same tribe capable of instilling a new love of learning.
But some parents still expressed reticence to send their children to class, preferring instead to enlist their aid at home in the ongoing struggle for economic survival.
So the foundation went a few steps further. It built fishing boats for individual families to ease their financial burdens. Then planned a weaving center with the same end in mind. And, finally, Yellow Boat introduced a food program, offering each student at least one solid meal per day.
“That enticed many parents to send their children to school,” Lim recounts. “Maybe for the wrong reasons, but it got them there.”
The results have been impressive. From its initial 15 students, the Yellow School of Hope has grown to around 300. “The bayanihan spirit was rekindled,” Lim says. “They came together because we empowered them.”
Which brings us to the island of Caub.
A remote barangay of Del Carmen—a municipality on the western edge of Siargao Island—Caub is home to Sugba Lagoon, the gorgeous clear-watered natural retreat that, in recent years, has attracted increasing numbers of tourists. The tiny island’s other side where most of its 500 families live, however, is an isolated shore accessible only by chartered or private craft. And it is there that Yellow Boat of Hope adopted Lasala Integrated School, a combined elementary/secondary/high school serving nearly 400 students.
The program began with scholarships for 10 outstanding “young scholars” in need of financial assistance to complete their educations. Next came laptops, printers, an internet connection, rain collector, and a food program. After the devastation of 2021’s Typhoon Odette, the foundation paid local builders to repair several severely damaged classrooms. And finally, it hired a local boat builder to create, well, a yellow boat. It’s job: ferrying teachers from the mainland to school every Monday morning and returning them home safely on Friday afternoons.
“It’s a mission,” the head teacher confirms.
As the boat approaches the shore on a recent Monday, the teachers slowly awaken from their silent meditations. Until now, it’s been a journey through paradise as the twisting green mangroves roll lazily by under the rising morning sun. But now the passengers gather up their things as their daily task draws near.
The walk from the pier takes only minutes. Then, suddenly, as if bursting into another world, they are surrounded by laughing, chattering children.
“Hello Miss Agad!” one says, and so the school day begins.
Immediately next to the campus is the boarding house in which the teachers will reside until Friday. And beyond that lies the magic of this tropical Philippine island, a series of tiny beaches and inlets filled with the stuff of real life.
In one of them, a man standing under canvas roof is building a boat. He says his name is Jimmy, the creator of the yellow craft that brought us to this place. Back when Typhoon Odette happened, Jimmy says, he lost all his tools. He was desperate, not knowing how to survive. Then along came Yellow Boat of Hope to buy him new tools and put him back to work.
“They saved my livelihood,” Jimmy says. “They saved my life.”
Later, on the trip back home, the water becomes momentarily choppy as the clouds grow dark. And I am involuntarily drawn into a fantasy I can’t escape: what if, I think, we capsize in a storm? What if this turns out to be the last trip I ever take?
And then it dawns on me how quickly life can change. How a moment filled with light can suddenly grow perilous. How life is uncertain, and its corollary unknown.
But another thought occurs to me, too, that the opposite is also true. How, when a situation seems impossible, help can suddenly alight. How one can often not foresee the very vehicle of one’s salvation.
Then, as if to prove its point, the dark clouds part and the sea grows calm. Once again, the sun bears down on us, shining brightly on our boat. And the only color I see is yellow, yellow, yellow.
A color, I must admit, that fills me with wonder.
________________________
David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist and author with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book, Dark Skies, is due out in May. This story appeared originally on the cover of The Manila Times’ Sunday Times Magazine.
