Philippines Part 1

Oh, this is going to be SO hard to do because we have SO many great pictures and stories from our time in the Philippines! It's almost overwhelming to know where to start. So I think I'm just going to have to take this Elephant one bite at a time and see how it comes out.

We had such a great experience while in the Philippines over Thanksgiving break. The following will be a description of what we did in pictures and in words. And then the next post I hope to put videos and pictures more of the plight of those who suffered the typhoons. Incredible stuff. Ok, hold tight! Here we go! This is our team starting out from the bus terminal here in Pyongtaek. There were 16 teachers & students total. I don't have time to tell it here, but God did an amazing miracle for us in the airport as the people checking us in told us our 3 youngest kids couldn't go. It was crazy the hoops we had to jump through, but I am so proud of my husband for sticking with it and not giving up and the issue. In the end, the 3 kids, Eric & Russell were the last 5 people to run on the plane before we took off. Amazing!
So I'm just going to jump right into the different ministries we were able to help with while there. The major thing we did was to go to this relief center twice a day to bring food to the people and also play with the kids, talk with them, do Bible Studies with them, and basically love on them with the love of Christ. 168 families, displaced from their flooded homes, have been placed here in this public gymnasium to live in VERY tight quarters. You can see how each family only gets a small square tent to live in, separated by thin sheets and tarps from everyone else.

When we would show up, the kids would swarm our van to greet us and then they would run to get their bowls for the food. It was a noisy, semi-chaotic mess, but we were able to feed these children (and adults) twice a day. Normally, I believe the government only brings food for them once a week.

I'm going to cut our the bazillion cute pictures of us with the kids hanging all over us and just focus on the ministry right now. Hopefully I can add those other cute pics later. :)

On one side of the gym, our students and a few of us Elementary teachers would take all the kids and try to do a Bible lesson with them and sing some songs. They loved it!

And on the other side of the gym, Eric and a few other teachers would round up as many adults as they could find and Eric would preach to them at the top of his lungs for about 30 minutes (it was very loud in there).

Another thing our team was able to do was pool our money to buy 200 Tagalog Bibles to pass out to the families in the relief center on the last day. Here we are unpacking them and writing a message in the front cover.In a short time period, Eric was also able to print up a Gospel tract for us to place into the Bibles. We tried to put as much Tagalog scripture in it as possible.

Previous to go on our trip, our school did a big supply drive for us to be able to take things over with us to distribute to the poor families. We brought tons of clothes, school supplies, and medical supplies. (And actually, we are still boxing up things to send because we couldn't take it all with us) This picture is of us separating everything. We decided not to pass it out ourselves but to save it for Myles to be able to pass out to the people at Christmas. (When all of our supplies will hopefully have arrived there by then).

Other things we did that were not related to the relief center: A few nights we were able to go over to the New Faith Family Children's Home and lead their evening devotions. Boy do those kids LOVE to sing praise songs!

We also were able to lead a chapel on Friday for the school next door that is also run by Kid's International Ministries.I think that basically summarizes the ministry aspect of our trip. Of course, one of the biggest aspects of what we did was to simply love on people so I will leave you with this picture of Eric with tons of kids hanging off of him. I LOVE IT!