Rotary Club of Makati holds bazaar tomorrow
MANILA, Philippines - The Rotary Club of Makati, a non-government organization, will host a Christmas bazaar at the Hotel InterContinental grand ballroom from 9 a.m., to 6 p.m. tomorrow, Sunday, Nov. 7. The event will be a venue for 110 concessionaires to sell Christmas décor, leather products, novelty items, home accessories, religious pieces, fashion accessories, linens, toys, books, and other products. Revenues generated through the annual RC Makati bazaar will go to the club’s general fund for its community projects.
The first RC Makati Christmas bazaar was held at the Manila Polo Club lounge in Rotary year 1988. It was envisioned as a simple, one-time fundraiser for the group, which was then in dire need of operating funds. For its first run, the bazaar raised P50,000, an amount considered a fortune at the time. Due to the bazaar’s success, the rotary decided to make it an annual event.
In RY 1998-1999, the Rotary put heart into this fundraiser by introducing the Last Angel gift-giving project. The idea was inspired by a published story in The Reader’s Digest. It’s about an orphan girl, who received an angel doll from a kind lady as a Christmas present. The Last Angel is a scheme under which bazaar shoppers are invited to pick an angel tag or two (or as many as they wish) from an angel tree. Each angel tag carries the name, gender and age of a child from a needy family, for whom the shopper would buy a gift. The gifts are wrapped by the Rotary Anns (wives of RC Makati Rotarians) who also take care of personally delivering them to the children’s doorstep before Christmas.
