Meet the mother

If I were the father of this blog, its mother is Daphne de Guzman Culanag.

Actually she is no mother at all having no kid of her own. But she is "big sister," "mother," and matter-of-fact admitted she is now a "grand mother" to street children and child labor victims.

The title of this blog I got from her. She narrated during the 1st National Media Summit on Child Labor last Wednesday her participation in a march to Geneva in 1998. She was with a group of child labor victims and advocates which marched from Pakistan, Iran and Geneva to shake the wits out of delegates of the International Labor Organization (ILO) on the troubling plight of child labor abuse worldwide. They bannered the call "no more tools in my tiny hands!"

Daphne is the Project Director of the ABK Initiative - a program to combat child labor through education. It is supported by the US Department of Labor.

During the past two years, the program sent to school 28,000 working and at-risk children from eight target provinces, including Davao City and Davao del Sur.

Daphne has extensive work experience on children advocacy and was part of the group behind RA 7610 and RA 9231, national laws protecting children from abuse and exploitation, and prohibition of worst forms of child labor, respectively.