It's hard to believe that in a few short days I will have been here for a month! I can honestly say that every day here has been amazing. I just returned from a week in the province of San Antonio, where the main campus of Shepherd of the Hills is located. It is a 4 hour ride by bus from the office in Manila.

We were able to treat the kids to a day at the beach, thanks to some money sent for that purpose from a friend in the UK. It was so much fun to spend the day splashing around with the kids in the ocean and to eat ice cream on the sand.

Most mornings of my time in Zambales were spent helping teacher Elena with the kid's lessons. It is so much harder to teach preschoolers rather than the highschoolers- they understand very little English. Thankfully a few of the older girls helped to translate! In the afternoons I had time to work on several projects that I am in the middle of and in the evening I got to spend lots of time just bonding with the older kids. I have heard so many stories that break my heart. Very few of the children at SOTH have not experienced horrible abuses and it is hard to hear about their lives... I pray that the Lord will be able to use me to help bring them healing in any way I can.

On Sunday we had an open-air church service with the kids on benches underneath the trees. Sunday night was one of the highlights of my time in San Antonio. I stayed up late with some of the teenage girls and boys sitting outside underneath the stars listening to their stories and telling goofy jokes. We grabbed a guitar and started singing all the worship songs we knew with the word "stars" in them.

Another Highlight of being in Zambales was grabbing the cans of silly string that I had brought with me and running around like a crazy woman spraying it all over the kids! One of the sweetest sounds that I have ever heard is a bunch of excited little voices calling "Ate Hannah, Ate Hannah!".

Here are some pictures from the past week: more to come later!

Day Twelve in the Philippines:

Mastered habits:
Hand washing my clothes in buckets
Using the correct etiquette when interacting with Filipinos (this is more complicated than you would think)
Eating without utensils
Taking (cold) bucket showers

New Foods:
Fish heads (not too bad)
Squid chips (delicious!)
Pancin (thin noodles with a variety of add-ins)
and LOTs more… every day I eat a food I have not heard of before!

New Words:
“Anong ginagawa mo”: what are you doing?
“Saan ka pupunta”: where are you going?
“Hindi Kita Maintin dihan”: I don’t understand you !
And my personal favorite “Puno ako ng Kaligiyahan!”: I am full of joy!

New Experiences:
English Lessons today were interrupted by a HUGE rat scurrying across the doorway of the schoolroom! I attempted to get a picture, but by the time I worked up the nerve to follow it with my camera, it had vanished (drat)!

On Monday I attended a seminar on the end times at Ate Ruth’s sister’s church, along with a vanload of the older teen guys and girls at SOTH here in Manila. The worship was awesome and the teaching was intense- One preacher taught for 6+ hours straight without even one break! It was so exciting to see the church here in the Philippines so passionate about getting ready for Jesus’ return! After the teaching I met many new friends within the church family, including a bunch of adorable kids- Stephen, Jamie, Hannah, Josiah, Jeremiah….. I had a blast squatting in the dust counting bottle caps and bits of cardboard in Tagalog with 2 year old Jamie: “isa, dalawa, tatlo, apat, lima, anim, pito, walo, sham, sampu!”

All for now! So much to do! Here are a few pictures:
Eating Ice Cream with Anne! Hers is cheese flavored. The main flavors here are vanilla and cheese instead of chocolate and vanila!

This is a typical street view...

Learning to wash my clothes with no washer and no dryer!


Side note: does anyone want to send me some money to buy this little guy a walker? Caleb is blind and he gets bored lying in his crib since he can’t have anything to look at, etc… It would be 20 USD max for a nice one.  He’s only 6 months but he prays for one every day (With a little help).

A Day in the Philippines

I thought that it would be fun to journal a day in my life here in the Philippines for you a to see what a typical day is like:

6:30 Time to wake up and have quiet time!

7:30 am: Breakfast! A hot cup of Milo (similar to hot chocolate in the states, but not nearly as sweet) and fresh bread. Each morning some of the kids will take a bucket around the corner to buy fresh-baked rolls from a sari-sari store. After breakfast- time to get ready for the day and set up for teaching!

8:00-9:00 am: Teaching math class to the teens. Today was my first day to attempt this, and it went quite well! I was thinking back to my childhood today- how I loved “playing school” as a little girl, with my dolls and stuffed animals lined up in rows- and thinking that it’s even more fun to “play school” all grown up, with real live students! We worked mostly on long division and multiplication problems with large numbers. Tomorrow we’ll do fractions. I normally hate math, but I love these kids so much that I don’t mind doing math with them…

9:00-10:00 am: Teaching English. This was so hilarious… I don’t know nearly enough Tagalog to explain new English words to the kids, so I had to resort to a mixture of drawings and charades… You should have seen me explaining the word “clumsy” to my little class! Pretending to run into the doorway, trip over my feet, drop things, etc. It was so rewarding to see the recognition on the kid’s faces, though, when they “got” a new word. We drew a person (whom we named “Fredo”) and labeled all of the parts of the body in English and Tagalog… the kids had a great time laughing at my mispronunciation of Tagalog words! The teens have a good grasp on basic English nouns and verbs, so we are working on adjectives and sentence structure.



10:00-12:00pm: Was supposed to be my time to rest (I only slept 2 hours last night), but as soon as I laid down, three of the little girls snuck in and we ended up playing instead… We rummaged through my things and found a package of balloons that I had packed to play with. We made up a game we now call “paa (foot) balloon” and giggled hysterically as we used our feet to keep the balloons in the air without touching the ground. I did get a little rest after the game, though it was with girls piled on top of me on the bed!



12:00-1:00pm: Lunchtime! Spaghetti- which is Totally different from spaghetti in the States! The sauce has chunks of cheese and other stuff in it as well as meat, and it is very sweet… almost a barbeque sauce taste. It’s a lot of fun to visit with the staff members here at the office over lunch.

1:00-5:00pm: A mixture of office work, Tagalog study, and free time to reply to emails and such. I am in charge of some communications work and I’m currently working on creating a database of all Shepherd’s current contacts and sponsors, as well as contacts that we would like to connect with in the future, like the ambassadors of some of the embassies here in manila- Germany, Spain, The UK, etc. Another project that I am helping with is planning a program of music and dance (to be performed by the SOTH kids) for a benefit concert that we are hoping to do within a few months. I got to listen to one of the girls here, Kariza, playing her violin. She plays entirely by ear and is fantastic! I asked her to learn to play the violin part for Michael W. Smith’s “Sacred Romance” and after listening to it several times she had the melody down! I love how music is a universal method of communication. The kids and I may not be able to understand each other very well yet because of the language barrier, but when we sit down with a guitar and play music together, the language barrier doesn’t matter… music is a language we all understand.

5:00 pm: I convinced Anne to go with me on a walk around project 4 (The neighborhood the office is in) with me (Don’t worry, I asked if it was safe first!) . We took Faye and Rich and Sabrina with us and bought candy at a sari-sari store around the block that was near the neighborhood’s public playground. We also stopped in to visit Henri, a childhood friend of Anne’s, who lives in the nieghboorhood.






6:00 pm: Anne and I decided to go out shopping for some things we needed around the house here as well as a phone card for me to call home. We rode a jeepney to a “class c” mall nearby to do our shopping. We ate dinner while we were out- pizza (from PIZZA HUT- pure joy) and Mango shakes! We rode a taxi back to project 4- some much nicer than a jeepney because it's enclosed and you don't have to breathe in the smells and pollution!

8:30-10:30 Calling home, reading and quiet time!\

10:30- lights out! :-)