After almost 21 hours of travel, my squad arrived in the Philippines on September 11 followed by an enormous wave of jetlag. We arrived at Kids International Ministries (KIM) around midnight our time and spent the rest of the night moving in and drinking A LOT of water (apparently it prevents dehydration..haha). We spent the first full day here trying to recover and stay awake as long as possible in order to adjust our bodies to the new time zone, it is tricky business. In the afternoon we walked around the community as a squad and explored some of the ministry opportunities here such as the children's home and the school. This organization reaches out to many areas in the community from sex trafficking and abuse victims, to pregnant women and street children, etc.
Today was our first full day of jumping into the ministries and each team was assigned something different. My team was assigned to construction work for the first half of that day (8am-12pm) and then loving on some of the girls in the community in the afternoon (1pm-4pm). For construction, we were shoveling clay/dirt and transporting it to the children's home in order for them to build a new section for the home. The people here are highly motivated to work and they accomplish things in such a short period of time, it amazes me. Doing construction was not very high on my list of favorites…actually it wasn't on there at all, but my team did such a great job of making it fun and enjoyable even though it was definitely hard work.
In the afternoon some younger girls from the community came over to KIM and we got to spend time preparing for them to come and asking the Lord to give us his heart for his people and to have hearts that are overwhelmed with love for them. We sat in a prayer room that over looked the Manila skyline while at the same time overlooked an extremely impoverished area of the city. It was a really cool moment for me as we were listening to worship to be reminded that our God is the same God over poverty and over wealth. Even though we may see and meet places and people that are experiencing spiritual warfare and who do not know the name and truth of Jesus and who are living in hopelessness, we ourselves are not hopeless for them. We know and believe that our God reigns and we have hope for the people here because of the truth that we cling to. So we are expectant that the Lord will do big things here and excited to step into his plans for this community.
