Unlike many charitable organizations that address the results of poverty, EVACE aims to overcome the root causes of it by helping people living on the margin gain the knowledge and skills required to more adequately and reliably earn a living. In the case of Ponson Island, the causes of poverty that we have identified are fourfold: a lack of accessible health care, a lack of marketable job skills, low fish populations, and low crop yields. Like the rest of the Philippines, where over 10% of the population must find employment in other countries to provide for families back home, many Ponson Island residents must leave the island to make a living, leaving spouses and children behind.
Our programs address all four of these causes of poverty and strive to keep families together by offering sources of income at home. The Good Samaritan Medical Mission, for instance, serves over 1000 of the island’s neediest residents for free each year. With love, dedication and skilled medical care, founders Chip and Rhome Nuttall have been operating for ten years on a shoe-string budget, with financial support from churches in the US and Australia, and from funds out of their own pocket. By recently incorporating and joining forces with EVACE International, the mission has expanded the kind and amount of care it can provide, both on the island and through an ever-growing network of consulting physicians and support services on larger islands.
Striving for an impact beyond mere crisis intervention, the new partnership created EVTEC, the computer learning center that teaches basic computer skills, programming, and other marketable skills, and allows students to do school research, apply for universities and for jobs. Likewise, our fish farm and high-yield crop projects strive to return profitability to the professions of fishing and farming so that these traditional sources of income can grow. Through these programs, we hope to offer opportunities limited only by the imagination.
