MANILA: Since the pandemic forced him into remote learning, 10-year-old Jhay Ar Calma has often had to climb on to the corrugated iron roof of his home in a poor neighbourhood of Manila to get an internet signal.
Up on the roof, he sits on a broken plastic basin and hopes there’ll be a signal strong enough for his government-issued device.
“Sometimes we change the SIM card to a different provider so he doesn’t have to study on the roof, but there’s rarely enough money to spare for that,” Calma’s mother Jonalyn Parulan told Reuters.
(Click https://reut.rs/2XjmWOE to see a picture package of Philippine students overcoming obstacles for online learning.)
Hopes for a return to classrooms this month have been dashed after President Rodrigo Duterte reversed a plan to trial in-person classes in low-risk areas, postponing any reopening indefinitely as the Philippines battles over 480,000 coronavirus
infections, the second-highest number in Southeast Asia.
The shift to online…
