Hi! I’m Janarie from Baguio, currently a hammy mom of 1 female cdh (named Pixie). We started having hamsters back in May of 2019 (if I remember it right). I wanted to get a hamster for my son so he could learn how to be gentle with smaller pets. A lot of people say it’s wrong buying a hamster for a child but my take on it is as long as the parent is the main caretaker of the hamster/s and you’re there to supervise them when they handle the hamsters then it’s fine. I remember wanting just 1 syrian hamster back then but the pet shop employee insisted the hamsters should go in pair or they would get sad living alone, I didn’t know much about hamsters back then. I honestly didn”t do a lot of research prior to buying a hamster.
So, we got 2 syrian hamsters, seed mix sold at the pet shop and got the largest wired cage they have at the time. I thought the hamsters would live happily with what we got them until I started joining groups and learned more about proper keeping (along with the learning I started slowly upgrading everything). The first hamster group I joined was Hamster Care Group UK, I’ve learned a lot from the group where I spent a lot of time silently reading, never posted though since it’s a UK group. I started to look for hamster groups in the Philippines and have joined a few. I posted a screenshot of thehamsterguy’s bin making video in one of the local groups I have joined asking about bincage materials accessible to me in our city and didn’t know BG was in that local group too, he invited me to join PHK and so I did. I’ve seen enclosures with lots of toys and enrichments, I was happy to find a local group where I was comfortable posting, had a sense of community with the members even when I just joined the group. Being in the Philippines, appropriate products for hamsters were hard to find especially back when I was starting so finding PHK then helped a lot with looking for items that were safe and appropriate.
An advice I can share for those wanting to have a hamster/s as a pet is really to do a lot of research first (which we should be doing to any kind of pet), you have to know what you’re getting into and if hamster is a pet that’s right for you and your family. Another would be to get all the basic things you need first before getting/adopting a hamster (which on my case was the other way around, I struggled looking for items I needed that I wanted to get asap. Most items got to me in more than a week so that’s something to think about too). Happy Keeping 
Philippine Hamster Keepers 