The Philippines is a beautiful country full of beautiful people, but it was by far my most difficult, broken month on the World Race.
Here’s everything you need to know about what my life looked like in the Philippines. I’ll be posting a separate post about what ministry looked like.
1.My team and I spent the month working with Kids International Ministries (KIM) just outside of Manila, the capital city of the Philippines.
2. My team stayed separately, but we had two other World Race teams nearby. Our ministry with the other teams overlapped sometimes, but we weren’t with them that much. We just hung out with them occasionally.
3. My team and I slept on mattresses on the floor of the downstairs living room on the girl’s side of a children’s home. We had to keep all of our stuff locked in two storage closets because some of the children struggle with stealing.
4. Having to keep our stuff locked away made it difficult because someone always had to hold on to the keys. We spent way too much time wandering throughout the children’s home trying to find the keys to where our stuff was.
5. When I say wandering – I mean wandering through basically a giant mansion. The children’s home was HUGE, and it was divided into three separate wings – the girl’s side, the boy’s side, and the nursery and dining room. It felt like a maze sometimes.
6. Living in the children’s home meant we were living in the same place where we were doing ministry, which made it difficult to find the distinction with when it was okay to rest and when we needed to be present.
7. We did have access to a missionary base that was also part of KIM, called the YMC, which was literally only a few yards away from the children’s home. It was kind of our sanctuary and place to go for rest, even though it was usually hopping with other missionary teams. We weren’t allowed to eat the food there, but they did have ice for making ice coffee, a gym and a spa. I got to work out often during the first half of the month, and I did treat myself to quite a few spa treatments though. The proceeds from the spa goes to support impoverished women in the community, and basically functions as microbusiness.
8. We couldn’t eat at the YMC because we were expected to eat all of our meals with the children at the home. Unfortunately, that wasn’t completely communicated from the beginning and became a source of conflict with our contact during the month. But it was fun to eat with the kids because they would always ask ahead of time if you would sit with them, which was precious.
9. Because of our living situation it was extremely hard to get sleep or rest of any kind. Every morning we woke up at 5:30 a.m. whether we wanted to or not, to the sounds of children yelling our names or shuffling around to get ready for school. Then during the day, we had no good place of our own to retreat or nap because we couldn’t lay our beds out during the day. We had to walk to the YMC base and find a couch but sometimes there were meetings going on and we had no where to go. One day I took my sleeping pad to a rat-invested storage room just so I could take a nap after an all-night shift in the nursery, but it was hot and hard to sleep there too.
10. Our extreme exhaustion as well as everyone on our team having different ministry schedules made it hard for us to come together as a team for worship or basically anything. It always felt like we were missing someone or looking for someone, which made it hard to feel unified as a team.
11. This was the first month we didn’t cook for ourselves on the race. It was nice to have a break from grocery shopping and cooking, but I missed having the option in what we wanted to eat and the ability to snack. I did sometimes break down and make trips to McDonalds or get food from street vendors as a snack.
12. Most of our meals involved rice and hardboiled eggs and some kind of meat, usually pork. We ate A LOT of rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Basically we ate a lot of traditional Filipino food – a lot of rice and little vegetables or protein. Sometimes we treated ourselves to mangos, which are extra incredible in the Philippines.
13. The Philippines has beautiful weather, especially in January. It basically feels like South Florida in the winter, only a little hotter. It’s been sunny for the most part, and it has rained in the afternoon a few times. It was such a relief after the frigid cold of China.
14. The beautiful weather allowed for a lot of flexibility in the dress code, and it was nice to break out the clothes I hadn’t worn since Africa. I wore shorts and dresses all month, and it was wonderful.
15. Air conditioning is super expensive in the Philippines, so there were basically fans everywhere. They’re kind of a big deal if you want to keep from sweating profusely.
16. We were blessed with consistent running water this month – and better than that it was filtered, making it safe to drink. The only thing was that we didn’t have any hot water, so our showers were freezing. But it was actually a welcomed relief from the heat.
17. We also were blessed with American style toilets, but toilet paper was scarcely found. We were always running around trying to find something to wipe with.
18. Another blessing was Internet access at the children’s home. The Internet was strong quality and it definitely allowed me to post more things in the moment. But it was still hard to find substantial time to spend on the Internet because of our hectic ministry schedules. Plus any times we were on our computers, the kids would want to look at our pictures or watch a movie so it was best to just go on the computer at night.
19. They speak a lot of English in the Philippines, and most people speak at least some English as well as their native Filipino dialect of Tagalog. Tagalog definitely sounds kind of like Spanish. For instance, “22” is the same in Tagalog and Spanish. VIENTE DOS!
20. The area we were staying in was pretty safe. It was ok to go out at night as long as we were in a group of three or more.
21. We took public transportation for the most part. In the Philippines, they have two main modes of public transport – trikes and jeepneys. Trikes are kind of like motorcycles with a side cart. You cram about 6 people on at a time and the one we took daily only cost 8 pesos or 20 cents. Jeepneys are old WWII trucks that are colorfully painted, have musical-sounding horns, and basically make you feel like you’re on a carnival ride. The price of a jeepney varies based on the distance you’re traveling, but it usually only cost us about 50 cents per ride.
22. The currency of the Philippines is the Peso. The exchange rate is about 40 pesos to 1 USD. It’s sufficient to say the exchange rate was in our favor, and while most prices were comparable we could also get other things for extremely cheap.
23. I went to church for a few Sundays at a church down the street from the children’s home, and it was pretty similar to American church only harder to understand because half of the service was in Tagalog. But toward the end of the month, I just had church with my team and listened to sermons from my church in Boca, Victory Christian Center. It was nice to hear the familiar voice and encouragement of my pastor in the midst of a difficult month.
24. To get away from our ministry site for awhile – we could take a quick jeepney ride to a nearby mall, which had STARBUCKS! I don’t even like Starbucks that much, but it was such a blessing to treat myself to the familiar coffee. We also took a much longer trip on one of our days off to a different mall where we got to see Les Miserables and eat at Chilli’s. It was so beautiful to feel like I was back in the States for a day!
25. At the end of the month, we also got to go with the social worker from the children’s home to Metro Manila and see a historical landmark – Fort Santiago and the shrine of Rizal, the Filipino national hero. It was pretty cool to get a glimpse of the history and culture before leaving the country.
26. As you can see, there was a lot of good and bad about this month. But overall what made it so difficult was that we faced a lot of spiritual warfare. Mainly we dealt with spirits of condemnation and guilt that made us always feel like we weren’t doing a good enough job, and then those lies were fed by real life situations and conversations that basically confirmed what we were feeling even though we truthfully were doing a good job and were literally giving everything we had and more. But I’ll talk about that in another blog…
