Several Pasig residents have gone viral after they were caught on video clearing out a community pantry, with one of them walking away with a tray full of eggs.
The video has raised the hackles of some Filipinos but the women involved have already apologized, the local media reported yesterday.
Carla Quioge, who organized the pantry in the village of Kapitolyo, was shocked at what the women had done.
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“It was so bad. They took the two trays of eggs, including the trays. I told them they forgot to take the table,” Quioge said in Filipino in an interview with news program 24 Oras.
The women told the organizer that they planned to share the food with their neighbors, but Quioge said they can just drop by the pantry on their own. Quioge said one of the neighbors of the women had contacted her to say that he did not get a single scrap of food from the group’s stash.
One of the women in the group has gone public to defend her posse’s actions, saying that Filipinos shouldn’t slam them on social media because they don’t know the entire story.
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“We asked the watchman there. He said that we should just take [the food]. The owner said that it was OK because it was for everyone. So when we went home, we gave some of them away. I’m sorry for our actions. But I just want to clarify that we didn’t steal them,” she said.
“We can return them because we’re being criticized on social media,” the woman said and added that their friend who took the trays of eggs has been judged unfairly.
A Filipina named Ana Patricia Non came up with the first pantry in her Quezon City village last week. The idea is similar to food banks in Australia and the United States, to help Filipinos who have lost their jobs due to the pandemic. People are free to take food and other items from the pantry, but they are also encouraged to give what they can. Within days the idea was replicated in several towns all over the Philippines.
