They call me… “Poison Ivy�
· Those
of you who have spent summers with me know that me and poison ivy do not get
along on any level. The first
summer I ever had it I bathed in oatmeal and calamine lotion and I were best
friends. The second summer I decided to army crawl through it and ended up
having to go on steroids to get rid of it. This last summer I got it yet again
and had to go on antibiotics to get rid of it cause it had gotten infected.
Then I come to the Philippines where they don’t even know what poison ivy, oak
or sumac is and I get it! What in the world! It has covered my body and with
the lack of clean water to bath in it is near impossible to take care of! Good times! Please pray for healing and
that the rest of the world doesn’t have anymore poison ivy!
I sold myself for the benefit of this ministry…
·
On Saturday pastor announced that we
were invited to a dance that was being held in town. We didn’t get much
information about it other than it was at 7pm and that it was a dance. So, we
were all pretty excited we like to dance and like all ignorant Americans we
were expecting it to be like a dance in the states. We walked down the road and were getting pumped because we
could here the music bumping. We arrive and like always get the stare down, the
ladies are then escorted to a
section of chairs that finishes a circle of women. JoJo the pastors
daughter, announces that the guys will be paying 20 pesos to dance with us.
What? At what point in time did I agree to selling my body? Haha Some of the
girls immediately got up and moved to the “I don’t want to dance” section. I
stayed in my seat and endured 2 very painful songs with “Where’s the rum?� man
and then spent the rest of the evening hiding from him. Filipino dances are
weird, the songs last 30 seconds and the have like a 2 minute monologue between
each. Definitely a night to
remember.
Road
Closed
·
Ok so it’s
Sunday morning around 8am and we’re headed up the road behind pastor’s house to
go to church. JoJo comes down the hill to announce that there is surprise
waiting for use. What a surprise it was. The owner of the property that the
road is built on made a fence to stop people from passing through. I guess
there has been some dispute over buying the land and outrageous prices, so the
owner tried to force the pastor to pay it by cutting off half of the population
from going to church. Thankfully their fence building skills weren’t that good and
we walked around it a few feet into the forest to get to church. So 8am road closed
9am we are going to build a new road. That’s how the Filipinos do it here.
There was no sad faces it was just like ok just a small bump in the road and
we’re just going to spend the next week building a new one. Sweet! So wake up
Monday morning, the fence that blocked the road is now a 100 feet into the
jungle blocking all possible way to the ministry center. O well! Pastor has a
plan to build another road and in 2 hours we put a huge dent into the Rainforest. Literally! Nothing like deforesting the rain forest! So now our ministry is to build a road into the side
of the mountain! God is good and it’s exciting to see the community come
together to make this road happen.
I
know this was a bit of a long one but I wanted to share a lot of what has been
going on over the last week! Thanks so much for reading and please continue to
keep me and my team in your prayers. We are still trying to figure out how to
live in community. Also we leave on the 9th to hed into Malaysia.
Please pray as sites or chosen and prepare the next ministry that wel will be
working with.
Peace
and Love,
Sandy
