Everyone from home keeps asking me “What are you DOING in the Philippines?”
The answer is more like… what aren’t we doing?
Here in Manila, options abound. Jeff Long, our contact for the month, seems to be racing toward sainthood by providing us with everything we could possibly need. Included in that is helping everyone to find their ‘ministry niche’ for the month.
Many of my friends are spending time at the New Faith Family Children’s Home. Staffing there is thin, and we come as a welcome relief. Five of our girls are actually living in a bedroom off the newly finished Nursery (shockingly, I am not one of them), and they are the ones who get up in the middle of the night to soothe away the nightmares of the littlest ones.
In recent years, Jeff was able to help establish a small Christian school for the local children, both those at the Children’s Home and several of the neighborhood children. They have an awesome curriculum from the US so they can learn at their own pace, but many of them are still trying to catch up to the grades level at which they should be learning. Because of this, several of us will be spending time at the school, working one-on-one with some children, and functioning as aides in the classroom.
Right now, there are three recent additions to the Children’s Home in the hospital. In the Philippines, hospital patients are required to have 24-hour care provided by the family. This means that those three babies need people there all the time to feed them, bathe them, change their diapers and hold them when they cry. Since 8pm on Friday night, this job has belonged to the women of the G Squad. Because the hospital is nearly 45 minutes away, the girls are on 12-hour shifts. The good news is that the babies are getting better, and one of them gets to come home today!
There exists a unique and interesting practice regarding the public domain. People here that own land, usually wall or gate it somehow. The portion of land that extends beyond the wall (often part sidewalk), until it becomes traveled roadway, is considered ‘public.’ ‘Public’ here means you can erect a dwelling on this spot, or work to establish of business of some sort. This is considered ‘Squatting’ and there are all sorts of Squatter’s Rights. It also means that you can dispose of trash just about anywhere. Just outside our gates, there is a long portion of sidewalk that until recently was a trash pile. Jeff Long has already had it cleared out, and we hope to fulfill his vision of installing playground equipment for the neighborhood children and planting a papaya orchard to help provide free food for everyone.
All this being said, Jeff has also left it up to us to find needs and use our own passions to answer those needs. So my answer to what are we doing here? Everything!!
Some new friends we met while working in the neighborhood today!
