Merry Christmas

This has been a busy and hectic couple weeks. We finished our last day of school before Christmas break today and have had a lot of stuff going on in school, as well as everything I have going on back home. It's been two weeks since I have been to bed by 2 and I am definitely ready for a break, I just hope I have some time to relax at some point. I apologize for not having a blog up last week and being late this week. i have some pictures for you from this week's Christmas celebrations and then also a lot of other random pictures from feeding sites or elsewhere.

 This is a picture of some of the Filipino teachers helping me unload one of the 50 pound boxes of school supplies that Escalon Presbyterian Church sent to the school. They have sent two boxes and the school is so grateful for what we have been given. My room is covered with posters and things that were sent and our kids are constantly using paper, crayons, pencils, colored pencils, markers and other things that our church sent.

 Our first attempt at trying to make a thank you picture for the church.

 The paper signs were much more visible. Thank you so much to everyone who donated school supplies or money to send them to us. They are needed here so much and it gives the teachers so much more ability to do things outside of the textbook. It makes it so hard to teach when you don't have any materials. The materials help give the teachers so many ways to reach the kids in visual and hands on ways that the kids enjoy and learn more from.

 Rjon

Jules and Jecel

 The 15 finalists for the singing showcase. We had singing auditions for the whole school, whoever wanted to try. The judges chose the top 5 students from KI and KII, top 5 from grade 1-3, and top 5 from grade 4-6. This last Tuesday we had the 15 finalists perform in a singing showcase for the school and their parents to see.  I had one of my second graders and three of my 5th graders in it. It was a fun time to be able to watch and enjoy the singing talents some of our students have. One of the coolest things I've seen here is having Muslim parents coming into the school and supporting their children in the Bible Quiz Bee and the singing showcase where they were singing christian or Christmas songs. To see them so excited and proud of their kids for being talented or knowledgeable in a christian environment is amazing. I honestly can't even explain to you how awesome it is and how powerful it is to see it.

Karryl Angel, Jecel, Rjon, and Mikaella

 Karryl Angel and Mikaella

Today we had our Christmas concert/ celebration/ party. Each class put on a performance, mostly singing. This is the other grade 2 class acting out the Christmas story.

 My grade 2 class getting ready to sing their song.

 The kinders doing their dance, they were definitely hilarious.

 My grade 5 class with the grade 6 class getting ready to do their song.

 My grade 2 class playing musical chairs during our Christmas party. All the parents came to watch the performances from the classes and then we all head back to our classes for our parties with games and opening presents, and lots of food.

Outside of school I get to hang out with some pretty cool people. I am so lucky to have such awesome missionaries here and the longer we've been here together the closer we've all gotten to each other. I have a family here. I have a lot of missionaries my age and we've all become great friends, and we also have three missionary families that we've also gotten really close with. I get to work with the missionary kids in youth group and we also spend a lot of time with the adults. There have been some tough times here and these people have been there to get me through them. They were friendly when I needed a friend and motherly when I needed motherly advice or just a hug. I am so blessed to have all these people here and we make an awesome team and strengthen each other so much. I know we were definitely all placed here to be able to work together as a team and do amazing things together and keep each other going.

 Playing hit the cup off of Carla's head with a whiffle ball using hockey sticks. It's a pretty fun game, definitely not easy though. Most of the time we play card games, but every once in a while we get creative.

 The 20's missionaries, after breakfast, before church. I chose the wrong two people to stand in between haha.

Two of my favorite Filipinas. Another part of working here is being able to form friendships with the Filipino staff as well. We have a lot of differences from our cultures but we also have a lot of things in common. We are teaching at the school for the same reasons and they might not be called missionaries but they left their homes to come to Boracay to teach and minister so that makes them missionaries in my book. We play basketball with some of the guys on staff and hang out, play games, watch movies, get ice cream with a lot of the staff.

 Kids at my feeding site.

My best friend at the Cagban feeding site. As soon as we come walking into the village she runs up and grabs my arm and pulls me to the place we do the site. She sits next to me  throughout the feeding and tries to help me when I'm playing doctor sometimes, we even have our own secret handshake.

 The typical houses in the villages around the island. This is on our way to our Cagban feeding site.

 I wish I would have put something next to this snail so you could see how big this thing is. It is by far the biggest snail I've ever seen. The dark brown part of the shell is about the size of a baseball maybe even a little bigger.

The longer you stay here and the more you spend time in the island and not on the beach the more you forget how beautiful this place can be. It's nice when you get reminders like this of how beautiful it is here.

I'll be taking a couple weeks off from my blog during Christmas, but I'll get it started up again in January. Thank you for your support and love, it is so important to everything I do here.
Merry Christmas.

Field Trips!

This has been a hectic week because of super typhoon Bopha hitting the Philippines. We haven't had anything but category 1 typhoons since I've been here and they were insane but it was definitely a lot of rain and a lot of wind. They were pretty big storms. This weekend we got the news that a category 5 super typhoon was headed our way. As you can see from he picture below this thing was pretty serious. When the storm is 3 times bigger than your entire country it's a little intimidating.

Bopha had wind gusts of 160 mph, which I cant even imagine how powerful that is. The news came out that it was a super typhoon and that the last super typhoon that hit the Philippines killed 1100 people and displaced 60,000 people, and Bopha was bigger and more powerful than the last one. That got me pretty scared. At first the eye of the storm was heading almost right at us but every time they updated the new path of the storm it moved further and further south. By the time it actually got to us the center was no where near us. We got the wind and rain from the outside of the storm but we really lucked out that the storm avoided us. Unfortunately, not everyone was as lucky as us. The storm hit the southern islands when it was still extremely powerful. I haven't heard much about the damage or anything specifically but I know that it was very devastating to the areas that it hit head on. The best news from this storm is that the Gov't really stepped in and stressed the importance of how serious this storm was and how important it was for people to follow the evacuation and safety measures that were being put in place. The President of the Philippines came out and said that this storm was not a joke and I think it made a huge difference in how prepared people were for it and I think it kept a huge majority of people safe. Thousands of people were evacuated from areas of flooding or landslides as well as everyone living along the coastline where the storm hit. The storm passed through us last night and this morning, and is moving out of the Philippines pretty soon. Please pray for the people who were impacted by this storm. There was a lot of damage and there are going to be a lot of people without a home to go to because of the storm. Please pray for everyone that may have lost a loved one in the storm.

 On a much brighter note, last week Agape participated in our first ever Quiz bee in Kalibo which is a big city on the other island. From grades 4, 5, and 6 we picked one representative for math and history. We took our representatives on a 2 hour trip over to Kalibo. We had one student unable to go so we had 5 students with us. Me and the Filipino teacher for grade 5 and 6 took them. It was an awesome trip and so much fun to be a part of. One neat part was that a lot of the kids hadn't been to Kalibo before which is so weird to me because it's really not very far away at all and it's the closest city to Boracay. We took off from the school in a trike and to have 7 of us in a trike is a lot of weight. There's a big hill right after the school and trikes have a hard time getting up it when there's a lot of weight on the trike. As soon as we started up the hill I knew there was no way we were making it. I saw the driver start shaking his head and about half way up the hill we ran out of momentum. I jumped off and start pushing from behind to keep us from going back down the hill and then Ronel, the other teacher with me, jumped out and we started pushing it up the hill. So I got to be sweaty from the very start of the trip. We made it to the port and took a boat over to Panay. From there we found a van to take us to Kalibo. The problem with vans is that they may be 11 passenger vans but that doesn't mean you can only fit 11 people in them. They literally wait until they can get the van packed completely full before they take off. We had 14 people and a baby in the van on the hour and a half drive to Kalibo, and I thought that was crazy until on the way back we had 15 people. It was not very comfortable at all.

We made it to Kalibo and took a trike to the school the Quiz Bee was at. The only problem was that when we got there they told us it had been moved to a different school. So we got back in the trike and headed over to that school. We got there and they told us that it had been moved again to a different school. We were running a little late because we had such a long trip to be able to get over to Kalibo, so the kids started freaking out that we were going to miss it. Luckily all of the schools were in the same side of the town. We got to the school and it was finally the right one. We got there just as they were starting the introductions to everything and quickly got them all registered. There were 34 other schools at the Quiz Bee from Kalibo and other towns in the area. We walked into the room and there were easily 300 people inside. As we were walking to the other side to sit down there were now 307 people in the room, 300 of which were staring at the white guy the entire way walking across the room. I was definitely the only white person there and I definitely stuck out. Talk about having a spotlight on you, it was like they had never seen a white person before. Luckily I'm pretty used to getting stared at so it didn't really bother me.
We had three of our students in Philippine History quiz. There were 70 kids total in the quiz. The quiz has three sections, an easy, medium, and hard. After each section of questions they collect all the answers and read the number of correct answers the students had. It took an extremely long time to do that obviously and it was amazing they were able to keep that many kids focused for over an hour to do the quiz. Our 6th grader did pretty well and our 4th and 5th graders did about average compared to the other students. The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners were all from the same school, and it happened to be one of the schools running the thing, so that was a bit sketchy, but oh well.
In the math quiz there were 73 participants and we had our 6th grader and our 4th grader in it. Unfortunately our 5th grader wasn't able to go which is really too bad because he is extremely good at math and I think he would have done really well. Our students tried their best and did about average. I felt bad for our 4th grader because a lot of the questions were about things she has definitely never learned about in 4th grade. She tried her best and was a good sport about it though. The best part about the trip is that they all had such good attitudes about it. Nobody wants to go so far away to this Quiz Bee and get so excited about doing well and then do average, but they honestly had such an amazing attitude about it and was awesome to see our students representing our school so well. The same school that won all the history spots took 1st and 3rd in the math quiz, so they are either an amazing school or had some extra-curricular activity going on in that quiz bee, but regardless we still had an awesome time.

Our five representatives from Agape, repping our school well.

After the quiz we went out to Jollibee which is a Filipino fast food chain. It is extremely cheap which is awesome because I bought them dinner to celebrate. I was definitely the only white person in Jollibee as well.

Ronel came up with this entire bowl of ketchup to the table and I was like there's no way that we are going to eat all of that ketchup. What I didn't realize was that the ketchup wasn't for everyone, it was for him. I honestly didn't know what he was doing because I didn't think it was humanly possible to eat that much ketchup, especially with only 2 pieces of chicken and some rice. But as you can see from the next picture he proved me wrong. He ate the entire bowl. Incredible, and slightly gross haha.

The trip was a ton of fun and it was really awesome with the group we had. It was a long day and we went through a lot of things but they always had a good attitude and just focused on having a fun trip. On the way back we were jammed in with 15 people in the van. We were playing I spy for most of the way back. One of the students says "I spy with my little eye, something white". Within a second another student shouts out "Mr. Schmidt" haha, it wasn't the right answer, just really funny that it was the first guess.

Yesterday we had our first ever school field trip scheduled. We were taking the 5th and 6th graders over to Carla Village for a community service project. We wanted to come up with a way for them to serve the community and the kids chose to go over to the village and read to the Ati children at their school. It was an awesome idea so we planned to go over there and have the kids read to them and then have some snacks with them, make a craft with them and then have some time to play with them. The kids were excited about it and the Ati school was excited.

We got everybody over to the port and then got loaded up on the boat to head over to Panay.

We loaded up in trikes and headed out to Carla village.

Group photo before heading up the trail to the village.

Totally candid picture walking up the trail.

We all met in the church so we could fit all the kids together.

We introduced ourselves to the Ati kids.

Then we started with the Philippine National Anthem.

We sang some songs with them.

We had the Pastora along with us as a translator.

We partnered up our students with 2 students from the Ati school to read together.

The boys did some reading in front of a big group and then also did some one on reading, it was cool to see them use different ways that they thought they could do things to help the kids.

Our principal with some students.

As you can see from all the pictures the kids are so into the books. When they first started they were kind of looking around not really paying attention but after a minute you could look around and see all the students start getting glued into the books. It was so awesome to see them take so much interest in the books. I was absolutely amazed with our students. I mean absolutely blown away. They were amazing with the kids. They were acting the stories out and explaining the pictures and describing everything to the kids. We told them we wanted them to be little teachers, we weren't really sure how it was going to go though. We were worried about how shy some of our kids are and how shy some of the Ati kids are. We also didn't know how well the reading was going to go with our kids keeping the kids together and interested. The Ati kids don't speak or understand a lot of English so keeping them focused reading an English book is not easy. The students used their bilingual abilities to explain things to the kids as well as help teach them English. It was amazing seeing them teach the kids. The student in the picture below was reading a book to them and he would read it to them, explain it to them in tagalog, explain and ask questions about the pictures, and then he would point to each word one at a time reading the word and then having them repeat it after him. He would do the right side of the book with the student on his right and vise versa. It was incredible to see some of the things they were doing and how effective they were.

It was so awesome to see the Ati kids become so interested in books and in learning, but it was also so awesome to see our kids having so much joy teaching and loving the kids. They were doing it out of absolute joy, which is the most important part of a true service project. Everyone there was happy and that is such an awesome thing to see.

We finished with a Christmas story after we had our snack time. After the story we had a craft for our kids to teach the Ati kids. We started the craft but we had to leave early because of the storm because we had to make sure we could get back across to Boracay before the port was closed. It was a bummer to have to leave early and so quickly, but it was really awesome hearing our kids asking why we had to leave so early, and when we were going to come back. Our kids showed so much love to the Ati kids and it was such an amazing thing to see how much God was using them to do. It was definitely an extremely inspiring trip for me.