For the past 5 days that we have been here in Tondo I have asked myself frequently if this is real life. I can hardly get over the fact that after a 30+ hour travel day we arrived in the Philippines, sweaty, tired, and slightly culture-shocked after Central America.
When we exited the airport we were greeted by 90-degree weather and those of us with pants on quickly went to change in the bathroom. After finding our contacts my team was informed that we would be changing locations and not going to TentCity after all. We unloaded our bags from the van taking us there and put them onto another van taking us to Tondo. Saying goodbye to the other teams we piled into the two vans with another team going to the same location. As we drove along I was soaking in the sights and smells of the Philippines (word of advice, never soak in the smells, hold your breath as much as possible) letting the realization of month 4 hit me.
I am going to let you in on a secret of mine. It’s one of those things that I feel bad for doing but my fleshly side does it all the time when we are going to a new ministry site. Whenever we are driving to a new site as we pass different places and slow down for things I look around and pray, Lord, please not here, don’t let us stop here. Every other time my fears were unfounded and we continued driving to a beautiful location. Mmhmmm not this time. This time we turned right. We turned right into what looked like the slums and we kept going deeper and deeper into the community. My heart began pounding realizing this was it, I was facing the reason I had come on the race, and I was diving head first into the nitty gritty. I didn’t know if I was ready, I didn’t even know if I could handle it but I became excited with the possibilities. My heart melted at the sight of those children’s faces with their little smiles and their hands waving.
We got out of the van at the church and our contact came out to greet us. He is a sweet pastor of a small church here in the community. Pastor Ramil and his wife Jenny have such sweet spirits of hospitality. At this point I had slept for about 5hrs total in 4 days and I was beginning to feel the exhaustion, add to that the sweat dripping down my back and I was ready to hit the sack, wherever that sack may be. We were able to confirm that one team would sleep in the church and the other team would sleep in a house down the road that they had previously negotiated.
Pastor Ramil and Jenny took us down the road to see our team’s house. We weaved in and out of the alleyways saying hi and waving to the people we passed. I felt like I was in one of those action movies where they are in a foreign country running through the housing alleys. We finally got to the house and found out that the woman had rented it out to somebody else… welp, ok guess we will all just stay at the church! It’s going to be a tight squeeze but anything is possible. Pastor Ramil continued looking around the neighborhood asking people if they had a place for us. They eventually found us a family who was willing to have us pile into their rooms upstairs. The 7 of us girls piled into two of their little rooms, yea it’s a tight squeeze but we are enjoying the bonding time!
After we had settled in we played with the kids for a little bit then a few of us crashed. I had all the good intentions of staying up until around 8pm but by 4pm I was seriously dragging. Keep in mind it was 2am back in America; which meant it was 1am Nicaragua time. Naturally, I caved to my sleepy desires and decided I would get over my jet lag some other day. Two of my teammates and I decided to take an hour nap just to refresh us and keep usgoing for the rest of the night. Ha, after falling asleep on the hard floor because we were too exhausted to roll out our mats we woke up 4hrs later just in time for dinner. Thankfully we didn’t have any trouble going to sleep an hour later.
That’s a little update on the first day here. There is so much stuff going on and my heart is already extremely attached to the children. I can’t wait to write another blog with pictures to show you all the beauty of these people!
