Philippines Tour 2025 – Bayawan

Bayawan is a coastal city in the south of Negros Oriental. It’s the agriculture capital of the province and home to the Philippines’ longest boulevard.

Bayawan is our main delivery location in the Philippines , and it’s also the hometown of Renko, our United Nations SDSN partner representative. Along with the Local Government Unit (LGU) and the Department of Education, Renko arranges our scheduled visits to schools and communities, as well as the transport needed to reach each location.

We visited a wide range of elementary and high schools, barangay halls, and community groups. Some were within Bayawan City, but many required long drives and adventurous excursions into the hills and jungle.

A few locations were especially challenging to reach. Lunoy required a two-hour hike and three river crossings. In Cogon, we crossed another large river by vehicle along an incomplete, bumpy track. The team also returned to Bokaw — an epic journey involving an off-road military vehicle (The Cobra), plus three hours of scrambling up and down rocky cliffs and old riverbeds.

We’ll be sharing those incredible stories in our next newsletter , but for now, there are so many other magical moments from Bayawan.

The PWB Talent Show Competition!

Our daytime show, went down really well. Daily performances gave the team an opportunity to develop their characters and experiment by finding funny improv moments with each other. For some audiences, it was their very first time seeing a live circus show!

For each show, we recruited three judges, either teachers or older students at high schools to complete the scorecards after each act. This added an unknown element that we loved anticipating. One scorecard featured only low scores , and a few less-shy volunteers fully leaned into playing the ‘mean judge’ to hilarious effect.

There was also a laughing-emoji card, which was used perfectly after Poppy’s frustrated “No Laughing!” to both Bazzinga and the audience when the competition wasn’t being taken seriously enough. Bazzinga’s balloon-dog competition was always a crowd favourite too. The balloons didn’t hold up well in the humidity, and by the end there was so much popping that the rising chaos added extra comedy to an already very silly scene.

Jules had the tough job of figuring out different technical setups at every location, from speakers and soundboards to microphones, often with less-than-ideal sound quality. She handled it magnificently, and the audience always had fun, which is the most important thing. It was also incredibly inspiring for the students to see: some young girls came up after one show and said, “OMG, a woman doing tech!”

Alongside the technical running of the show, Jules also conducted interviews with teachers. Through these conversations, we learned so much about the lives of both students and educators — many of whom walk for hours each day just to get to school, or leave their own families behind for residential Monday-to-Friday teaching roles. We also heard about a staggering number of children who have no family in the country at all, as parents have left to work overseas, leaving them to fend for themselves.

A teacher at Dawis Elementary shared her experience:

“The kids walk 4km to school; lots of them don’t have parents or support at home. Most of the children wake up at 4am to start the day and still don’t earn enough to support themselves, so we as teachers spend a lot of time making food, finding clothes, and trying to help. But we as teachers also wake up at 5am to prepare. To see a break for their mental health, for their psychology, is really special — and for us as teachers too. We really need that as well. We hope that if they stay in school, they will be able to get a better job to support themselves.

We also learned of the heart-breaking reality that in some high schools, suicide rates are at their highest, particularly linked to increased access to phones, AI, and social media . This made the themes of the show feel especially relevant and timely.

One participant from Bayawan National High School shared:

“I think what your organisation does is very noble. There are students here who are not normally happy, but now they are smiling, laughing, and participating.”

In Bayawan alone, we delivered a total of 20 sessions with 1377 workshop participants and 7280 audience members!

Many of the schools were combined (elementary and high school) with well over 300 students present. Our current capacity max for workshops is 150-200 (due to the equipment numbers we’ve managed to bring over the last 3 years). So for quite a few groups we did a show for everyone in the local barangay hall or school gymnasium. The energy of these shows was so big, with hundreds of excited children and teens cheering and screaming.

THE BARNYARD COLLECTIVE

This group deserves a special mention as we’re planning to develop a stronger partnership to support the sustainability of circus in this region of the Philippines . It’s the home of Julia and Bob and their kids, turned into a local community space supporting a variety of groups in Bayawan focusing on creating a safe space for street children, arts and music enthusiasts, and mother-and-baby groups.

We spent an afternoon sharing new skills with their community. As it was a smaller group than most of our school visits, we could work closely with participants and run some fun workshops. We started with opening circle games, then split into groups: Ryn & Ethan taught acrobalance on the lawn, Gorka & Gina did diabolo on the porch, and Jules taught staff skills in the indoor space. We also ran juggling, hula hoops, an open-box session, and even some giant bubbles — which everyone loved!

We were so impressed with the progress all around! Some kids already attend majorettes and quickly picked up club manipulation. The children from the Fisherman village we visited last year also joined and were eager to learn staff tricks, which they picked up impressively fast. Some parents got involved too, and we plan to run online tutorials for adult community members so they can continue teaching the kids while we’re away.

We would have stayed longer, but we had a show that evening for the Bayawan Christmas Lights Celebration. After a last-minute panic trying to track down fuel to fire spin with (all kerosene was recently banned from the city!), we managed to find some thanks to Bob and his incredibly helpful team!

Next year, we hope to spend even more time with this amazing community. We also left our kit there this year so they can continue using it, and we will definitely be back!

If you’d like to learn more about them, check out their Music 4 Change project:

“A collaboration of musicians from various walks of life with the common idea that music is a powerful catalyst of change. We believe that music inspires and moves humanity to bring social justice and environmental awareness.”

The Christmas Lights show was a success, & we felt very grateful to be a part of it. The Barnyard community came to watch and cheer us on from their front-row seats. There were fireworks, live music and many locals eager to take photos with us after the show. We are so grateful to Renko & all of the team for their partnership in making this project happen.

If you’d like to see more photos from the tour, check out our socials. Here’s a link to a video from our visit to Bayawan National High School that the students created so quickly; we were all so impressed.  https://www.facebook.com/share/v/17kDNmgyCP/

Keep your eyes on your inbox, as we can’t wait to share our adventure stories from Bokaw, Lunoy & Cogon.

Love from the Team x