Ella Ponce RN, of Marayong has twenty five years of nursing experience, with the last 20 years served here in Australia.
This involved work for six years in Westmead Children's Hospital as a Theatre Nurse, thirteen years Seven Hills Nursing Home, and eight years in Mt View Nursing Home; in the recent time on concurrent part time basis. This is no mean feat considering she has been a single mother for ten years, raising five children aged 21, 19, 15, 10 and 9 years.
Recent postings on social media caught my attention where Ella asked for volunteers to help her and her children to distribute one hundred take away food containers to Filipinos on student visa. This visa allows the students to work a total of twenty hours which covers their subsistence costs. Many, if not all of them would have lost their jobs due to many businesses being shut down.
When asked how she was able to do this, Ella said:
"At the moment due to COVID-19, I quit Nursing and decided to stay with my children and make cooking as a full time job with the help of my children. I now do real state on the side through online fo real estate development overseas.
"And I do love cooking as one of my hobbies that turns into kabuhayang swak na swak teaching my children.
"I also love reaching out to those in needs on my own little way by sharing food especially now to those being affected by this pandemic COVID-19. I’m trying to do shopping and do grocery for the elderly and others in the community who are on self isolation.
"I’ve been inspired by our fellow pinoys assisting our kababayans on student visa and struggling as they lost their jobs. My heart goes to them and would love to share what little I may have."
This petite woman, measuring 5'2" [1.57m] who belies her age of 49 years is originally from Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija in the north of Philippines. She and the family migrated to Australia in 1996.
She is now fast becoming well known to the Fil-Aussie community with her popular Filipino dishes such as Dinakdangan, pork barbecue, okoy, vegie or Shanghai lumpia, sisig, tocino, etc and kakanins puto bumbong, pastillas, nilupak, malagnit na bibingka, and many more.
If you are craving for any of these and you want to help this dynamo mother keep on helping others, you can contact her through Facebook.