I’m extremely sorry that it has taken me so long to post about the Philippines but I finally have an update!
We arrived in Philippines late Wednesday night, Sept. 11th and it took about two seconds for me outside to be hit by the humidity of the Philippines. The humidity here is crazy. It definitely makes me wish for Alabama some days!
After arriving we went straight to our lodging, which is in the city of Cainta, a city a little less than an hour outside of Manila. I was delighted to find out that we would be sleeping in beds, have showers, electricity, access to the Internet at our lodging, and meals prepared for us! We’re definitely pretty pumped about this arrangement because I’m pretty positive this will be the nicest place we stay for the duration of the race. The food has been great as well, no complaints!
The first day Thursday we spent the majority of our time sleeping and resting trying to get over jet lag. We also got a tour of the city, which you can probably guess, looks a lot different than some of our towns in the U.S.. In the area that we’re at, it seems as if most people are living in tiny huts, built with scrap metals. Going on our tour of the city, we would walk by rows and rows of these houses. Most of the time there would be some family members in the doorway, with a chicken tied up outside, and an open doorway where you could see with their families, dogs, and chickens would be inside or just outside. Most people here are extremely friendly usually waving to us and saying hi. The kids run up to us wanting high fives and asking us questions. Most people here speak English so we’re usually able to communicate via English. The locals also speak Tagalog and I’m trying to learn.
On Friday we started our first official day of ministry. We do about 8 hours of ministry splitting it up into two four-hour chunks. Ministry activities we’ve done so far include playing with kids at an orphanage, tutoring at a school, and a lot of construction projects. We’ll also get the opportunity to go out to different communities and provide food to refugees of the flooding that occurred recently in the Philippines that displaced many people. While we provide food, we will also get to know the people and it may present an opportunity to share the Gospel as well!
We got to attend church on Sunday and put on a VBS type day in the afternoon for children in the community, which was awesome. This past Tuesday, myself and some other members of my squad went on a hike up an active volcano in Tagatay city, which was pretty fun.
Overall the first week has gone pretty well. My team has started to build relationships with many of the kids in the orphanage and getting in to a routine and it has been really great to partner with a ministry that is so dedicated to serving abandoned children and the poor in this community.
I know I just did a pretty quick overview of the past week but will hopefully get to go in depth on some of our activities in future posts.
Prayer Requests
- Opportunities to share the gospel to people that we meet throughout our stay here
- Energy and rest for our team. Our days are pretty busy and the construction can be especially draining
