Blog November 2025

Arriving Bohol at the end of October this time was a bit too adventurous. Why? Well, two super strong typhoons swiped over the Philippines while we were there, the first one killed more than two hundred people on the neighbor island of Cebu. This meant that IHelpFriendship’s program also was affected. We had to postpone one of our seminars about teenage pregnancies for a day. And when we had that seminar, some doctors could not attend because they were needed in their hometown to take care of patients affected by the typhoon.

But nevertheless, we had a wonderful response from those who participated, especially on seminar 2, where school leaders and midwives were present.

The outcome was:

1.      There was an agreement that they all would go back to there municipality and work for better education about reproductive health/family planning in their schools

2.      They would work for better communication with the teenagers in their schools about the connection between early childbirth and poverty.

3.      In addition, we were able to have a dialogue with the youth leaders who were present at one of our seminars. They want us to come back and teach all the youth leaders on Bohol (in 52 municipalities) about how to talk with their youth population about sex and about contraceptives.

4.      We hope to be able to do this training June 2026.

This time we had a visitor from Norway together with us, Morten Andreas Bye.

He did a great job recording interviews and producing material for our website. And he has promised to continue to work on our website. Thanks Morten!

Gunnar