Efren Peñaflorida
A slum kid from Cavite who pushed a classroom on a cart to children the gangs were recruiting
Efren Peñaflorida was born in 1981 in Cavite City, south of Manila, the son of a tricycle driver, and grew up in a shanty beside a rubbish dump. At school he was small, poor and bright, which made him a target for the gangs that ran the neighbourhood and recruited among boys his age. He was beaten for refusing to join and for a time was afraid to go to class at all.
In 1997, at sixteen, he and a group of friends decided that the only real answer to the gangs was to offer children something else to belong to, and founded the Dynamic Teen Company. It began as a youth group that did clean-ups and tutoring, and its members were teenagers not much older than the children they helped.
The problem was that the poorest children never came near a school or a church hall. So the group took the school to them. They built pushcarts fitted with a blackboard, shelves of books, crayons and a first-aid kit, and wheeled them into cemeteries, under bridges and onto the dump, where children who scavenged for a living sat down on the ground and learned to read. The pushcart classroom taught thousands of children basic literacy, hygiene and arithmetic and fed them while it did so.
In 2009 CNN named him its Hero of the Year, and he used the prize money to expand the work. He went on to qualify as a teacher and to preach, and still works in Cavite.