First off, sorry for not posting a blog in a long time, I will try to be better about that going forward. Anyways, now that I am packing to leave Tacloban and go do manistry in Manila (ministry with only the men from F-squad), I suppose it is time I should tell you all what my team has been doing in this city.
For this first month and a half of the Philippines my team and 3 other teams have lived and worked in the city of Tacloban. We live in a place called The Lighthouse, which is a ministry of Kid’s International Ministries. The Lighthouse consists of a main building with a living room and kitchen space upstairs along with a bunch of rooms for missionaries to stay. Downstairs some of the staff live and there is also a kitchen where most of the meals are prepared. There is another building connected to the main building that is only half finished. This second building has 2 rooms for guests and a few office rooms which they are now using for school rooms for 3 and 4 year-olds. On the second level of this room there are lines to hang clothes and on the third there is no roof so there is just some construction stuff up there waiting to be used again. In front of the building there are a few parking spaces and then a playground where kids from the neighborhood come every night and play. My favorite time of most days is when they come over and I get to play with them all sorts of games. There is also a basketball court right next to the playground which is in use all the time. Across the street there is a beach but it is not that good now because there is a lot of construction happening over there.
As for our ministry, we do many things. Having 28 people in the same spot, they move us around a lot. Usually the schedule for my team for the week looks like this; On Mondays we have kitchen duty and nightguard, basically we just clean and help the kitchen people with whatever they need and then take shifts all through the night as guards. Tuesdays we go to a feeding in the morning and then help teach the 3 and 4 year-olds in the afternoon. The feedings are my favorite things, we take 2 huge buckets of stuff they call lugaw (loo-gow) which I think is meals from kids against hunger, and we go to different schools and villages every morning and afternoon and feed the kids there and then play with them. My team was only schedules for one morning feeding and one afternoon feeding each week but I would join in more sometimes because playing with the kids is so awesome! Then on Wednesdays my team and usually another team would go to a church they are building and help with the construction. My team has been a part of clearing the land, leveling the ground, and pouring the floors. This has been a good thing because in Albania we did a lot of teaching which I am not very good at, but I am quite good at playing with kids and doing construction which we are doing a lot of here in the Philippines so far. On Thursdays we would help teach kids in the morning and then go on a feeding in the afternoon. And then on Friday we go to the construction site again. Saturdays were my favorite days because we would all sign up for whatever we wanted to do and I would always sign up for the feeding. On Saturday they only did one feeding but this feeding went to a village that has a trail leading off into the jungle, and if you follow this trail it leads across a stream a couple of times and then all the sudden you came to a large pool with a waterfall on the other side. There was a large rock next to the waterfall that we could all jump off of. If you kept following the trail it would eventually take you to a second water fall with even better jumping spots. This was my favorite place because even though the pool you were jumping into was only about 15 ft wide and maybe 35 ft long it was deep enough to jump from over 30 ft! On one side there were very large rocks and on the other side there was a cliff. You could jump from any side and if you climbed up the cliff there were some really nice high spots to jump from. I even did a gainer off a 20 ft drop over a little tree! If you followed the trail farther there was a 3rd pool with 2 waterfalls, if the water was high enough you could jump from the top of one of these waterfalls which was maybe 30 ft or so. Saturdays were the best, spending hours with the village kids doing crazy flips off sketchy cliffs and just laughing with them. On Sundays we had nothing going on, it was a day of rest and a day to go into town and get some Wi-Fi to talk to family and upload blogs.
Our hosts here are awesome people! Mama Jay is the main cook and her and her husband papa cel are the owners of The Lighthouse. Then there are 2 sisters Abigail and Beryl, these are 2 of my favorite people! They do a lot with the kitchen and Beryl also leads the feeding with either Trex, who is super funny and the mechanic/maintenance person, or Leo who speaks super good English and is maybe the funniest person here! Leo is the nurse here. There is also another woman named Ira who is very funny and bubbly and loud sometimes. The people here at The Lighthouse are some of the most awesome people I have ever met!
Tomorrow (the 15th) we leave at 5:30 in the morning to fly back to Manila for debrief and then after that all the men from the squad will go to northern Manila and work with a boy’s home and all the girls who were at the lighthouse before with come back. That means that this is the last day Team Edifly will be doing ministry together. Next time I write a blog I will probably be on a totally new team. It will be very strange; these people have become as siblings to me. When I think of my siblings I think of Ellie and Levi and Chris and Grace and right beside them I see Edifly. These people are literally some of the first people I have ever truly opened up to in my life. They know more of me then even most people I have known my whole life, indeed even though I have only known these people for 4 ½ months now, we are closer than people I have known for years. It is amazing how being intentional can make such relationships so fast. I have experience more growth with these people then I have ever experienced in my life, and this is only the beginning.
I have also been thinking more and more about what I want to do after the race. I think I will do a discipleship program that Adventures in Missions does called CGA and then after that try to squad lead. I have made no plans for sure, but I feel like God has called me to be a missionary and specifically to squad lead at some point.
