It has also been interesting seeing how much things have changed here on the island since I've been here. It is still a fairly new tourist destination and so it is still growing and developing. There are new things going up and things changing all the time. I got to the island right at the start of typhoon season and it's ending right about now. Everything was blockaded and weatherproofed as much as possible along the beach for typhoon season and now a lot of places are taking things down and things are getting so much more open along the beach and it looks so much different. The biggest thing that has happened though is the opening of Mcdonalds on the island. It is the first American restaurant on the island and really the only place you can get a hamburger that's actually partly cow on the island. It was weird because we went to Iloilo a couple weeks ago and were so stoked about Mcdonalds there and we were saying that Boracay should get a mcdonalds so we wouldnt have to take a 5 hour trip to get it. Within a couple days of getting back there were signs up all over the island about mcdonalds coming soon. We figured that could mean anything from a month to a year. We were definitely excited but weren't expecting for it to be opening a week later. We found out on Saturday that it would be opening on Sunday at 9am. I really wanted to camp out that night in front of mcdonalds so we could be the first customers, but I couldn't get anyone to do it with me. Which is kind of a bummer because I know so many people that would have totally done it with me back at home. It worked out alright though, I wasn't the first customer but we still got to go after church. There were literally without exaggeration over 100 people there. It seemed like the whole island was there, it was so crazy. Almost all of our missionary staff was there along with a lot of the Filipino teachers from the school. We waited in line for a while but the wait was worth it, it is amazing how eating no American food for 4 months can make something like mcdonalds taste so amazing. It was absolutely incredible and we were definitely pretty happy people. Unfortunately because we live on a tourist island where everything is more expensive than it should be, so is mcdonalds. It is a lot more expensive than it was in Iloilo, and is even more expensive than it is in the US. That is a major bummer, but it might be a good thing because it's going to make us eat there less and probably keep us all a lot skinnier.
Mcdonalds was definitely one of the biggest highlights of the week but altogether this has been a really awesome week. Things have just been going well and everything just seems so awesome. I have had a lot of time to spend with the other missionaries here and I am making some really awesome friends. I think it is such an awesome group that we have here and it's so neat to see how we all just kind of ended up here from finding it online and felt it was where we were supposed to go. I think we can really see how much God has really called us all to be here and how we each play a part in what God is doing here. We spend a lot of time playing games and hanging out but we have also gotten to know each other a lot better and we are able to encourage each other and help each other at such a deeper level. It has been awesome getting to be so close to everyone and it is awesome because several of the missionaries are thinking about coming back next year which would be so awesome. We have church on Sundays and Bible study on Thursdays, and then obviously have a lot of things throughout the week but we really started to talk to each other about the struggles we have with church and with not really having the same amount of time with God as we had had back at home. Church is hard here because it is a Filipino church that we go to so the pastor and pastora do the sermon in both languages. It is really hard to track a lot of the time and can be tough not to get something out of the message every week. So four of us decided to start a weekly prayer session where we basically just meet every week and spend some time talking about how we are really doing. Getting into a deeper level and really being able to pray for each other and encourage each other. We have done it the last 2 weeks and it has been really awesome. It was hard for a while when I got here to be going through a lot of things and not really having anyone here to be able to go to to talk about things. I have those people here now and I get to be one of those people for someone else so that is really awesome.
Probably the biggest highlight of the week came yesterday for me at the immigration office. When you are here for three months or longer you need to get an id card or an i-card to be on the island. You also still have to pay the same amount to be able to extend your stay every 2 months. It gets really expensive and can be a little annoying. The immigration office is known for it's corruptness of taking advantage of foreigners and also their lack of understanding or caring about your situation. Two months ago when I was extending my stay I also had to apply for my i-card. It cost about $90 and required a lot of paperwork and copies of different things. They told me all of the things that I needed for it and so I went out and got everything done and brought it back a couple days later. They said ok, and it would take about 3-4 weeks to be done. So after about a month and a half I went back in to pick it up and they said it wasn't there. They looked at my stuff and said that I didn't turn in a copy of my receipt so they couldn't do it. So I politely tried to explain that they told me everything I needed and I went out and got it all and they said it was all there. They didn't really care what I had to say so I went home to get my receipts. I made the photocopies of them and brought them in the next week. They told me that it wasn't the right receipts and that the i-card wasn't on the receipt. This made me upset because I kept all of my receipts and these were the receipts that they had given me. They are all written in abbreviations so I cant really see what they are saying but I knew these were either the right receipts or they didn't give me the receipt, I knew I didn't lose it. So I went home and looked through all my stuff and there was no receipt anywhere. So my time expired on Saturday so I needed to go in and get my extension and try to figure out the i-card situation also. So Thursday was a holiday that nobody even knew about until Wednesday, which seems to happen a lot here, so I couldnt go Thursday. I went on Friday after school and youth group and they were closed. I was so mad because now I was going to have to pay the over-extended fee as well as probably buy another i-card which would be another $115 dollars beyond just paying for the $70 dollar extension. I had heard of other missionaries that were a day late and the immigration office didn't care and still charged them the fee. So Sunday night in our prayer group I brought it up to pray about and it was one of those things that as we were talking about it I really didn't think prayer was going to do much. I knew that I was going to have to go in and get ripped off by these people because that's just how things are. Well Monday God sure taught me a lesson. I went in there and told the guy that those were the only receipts that I was given and that he knew that I paid for it. He did his normal routine of you must have lost your receipt, you need your receipt sir. Well they just so happened to have a supervisor lady from somewhere in there right then and so she saw there was a problem and came over. I told her the situation and all of a sudden we went from having no solution to simply looking in my file to see if I had bought it. She comes back and says your copy of the receipt was in the file and they never gave it to you. Just go make a photocopy and bring it back and it'll be ready to go. So I did and that was solved so then I asked to extend my stay and he of course said that I was over extended and all that. So I told him I wasn't able to come Thursday because it was a holiday and you were closed Friday. Well apparently I don't think they were supposed to be closed on Friday because he immediately tried to hush me up and said everything was ok. So I was able to extend without paying the over-extended fee. I was legitimately going in there ready to pay $185 and ended up only paying the $70 that I should have payed. I immediately was in awe of the power of prayer and how no matter how much it seems like there's no possible way that things will work out, God is so much bigger than what we label as possible and impossible. I was so upset and did so much worrying over the situation because I didn't think it would ever work out. Praying was the last thing I tried, and I still didn't even think it would work. I think so often prayer is always the best solution, but always the last option. We always try to fix things ourselves and then when we are in desperation we go to plan b or c which is prayer. When if we would have just gone to prayer in the first place we would have saved so much trouble and so much anxiety. Prayer is so much more powerful than we can ever imagine and it's because we are taking the situation out of our hands and putting it in God's, and he is able to do so much more than we ever could.
On that note I do have some prayer requests for those who wouldn't mind praying. I have two students who failed English last quarter and it puts us in a really hard situation because they don't hold kids back here. It isn't an option because people just don't look at it the same way we do here. If you are held back here they take it as an absolute failure.You have no chance in life if you were held back. Which is the worst possible way to look at it. Kids are getting passed from grade to grade without learning anything and are getting further behind every year because they are just getting passed. the problem is that these kids just need more time to practice and catch up. Taking the 2nd grade over isn't a failure. What would be a failure is to not learn anything in 2nd grade, not learn anything in 3rd grade, and not learn anything in the rest of your education because you were never ready for any of it so you understood nothing. These kids have a chance to spend another year trying to grasp these concepts and then move into the third grade and be at a level where they can understand it. Instead they will be moving into third grade and will not be ready for it and fail it as well. My partner teacher talked with both of the students' parents today and it was interesting hearing what was going on. One of my student tries really hard but just doesn't get any of it. It is pretty obvious he has a learning disability but he is so far behind that it just makes it that much harder. Apparently his parents are never really home or when they are they don't have time to help him with school and even if they did they don't know enough to be able to help him. This makes things so hard for him because they don't have resources for student's with learning disabilities like we do in the US. they are thrown in with everyone else and are expected to handle everything like everyone else. Without any help from home his only chance is to get help from his teacher's but he needs so much help that there just isn't enough time to be able to get him ready for 3rd grade when he really isn't even ready for 2nd grade. I'm not going to include his name but I really hope that you would pray for him and that he would be able to get the help that he needs and we would be able to come up with the best solution for him to be able to be successful.
Our other student is very different. He just doesn't care. He is failing because he doesn't do his work, doesn't try on any of his work or tests, and doesn't do anything to try to improve. His biggest problem is that his parents don't take his school serious, so why would he. He has missed school before because he stayed up late watching tv and was too tired to go to school in the morning. He has missed school because he wanted to watch tv instead of go to school. Well, if you let him do it then of course he will. If you make tv more important than school why would he ever try in school. They are trying to claim that he has a learning disability, and I'm not a doctor so I can't say he doesn't, but he has shown that he has the ability to learn just fine, but he has to want to, and he usually doesn't. It makes me sad that they are trying to claim a learning disability is the reason he is failing when in all reality it has a lot to do with his parents attitudes towards school I think. I really pray that his family will realize how important school is and that they make such a huge impact on his education and they are very responsible for how he does.
These are not very rare cases here. There are so many of my students who don't have support from there parents whether because they aren't there, they don't care, or they don't know how to help. Many of my kids parents, especially fathers, live in other countries or other parts of the Philippines for work and it is not uncommon at all for students to live with only one parent or even with aunts or grandparents. It is also very common for students' parents to work long hours and not have a lot of time to spend helping them with schoolwork. There are also a lot of students who have parents who don't speak English, it makes it very hard for them to learn English when they don't have any English outside of class. Please pray for all of my students, and all of the students at Agape who are going through hard situations at home and don't have the support that is so important for these kids to have.
I apologize again for the lack of pictures, I should be getting my new camera soon and will be able to put pictures up again. Until then here are some pictures another missionary took. We play basketball every once in a while here at a nice court close to the school.
To finish on a funny note I have a couple of stories of my students to share with you. We have a club time during the day where the foreign teachers teach a station of either art, music, pe, or some other things like that so the Filipino teachers can take their lunch. We have another PE teacher on staff so I decided to do a drawing station. It has been a lot of fun and has been really neat being able to teach them some of the things I have been taught how to draw. For this rotation I am teaching them how to draw an oak tree and it is really interesting because a lot of them haven't seen an oaktree and haven't really seen many trees like an oak tree here. My dad taught me how to draw an oak tree and it has always been something I've enjoyed drawing, and now I am getting to teach 200 kids how to draw an oak tree. The other day while I had one of the first grade classes I was getting to the last steps of drawing it and so the tree I drew on the board was about done and one of the 1st graders came up and he had a puzzled look on his face and was staring at the board. I thought he was going to ask a question about something or he didn't understand something. He then said with the same puzzled look on his face "that looks like a real tree". It was like he was puzzled how I could make it look real or something. I said well good, that was what I was going for. He gave it one last look and then turned around and went back to his seat. It was so funny and I guess I was glad that my tree looked real.
Today in my 5th grade class I was checking my students' sentences they wrote with their spelling words and I read the students who sit in the front row papers upside down because I am in front of them facing them. One of my students has made a comment before about how I read it upside down and I was thinking he was meaning that is hard to do or something. Well today I was reading his sentences upside down and I noticed he was staring at my eyes and had a really puzzled look on his face. I looked at him and he asked how I could read upside down. I kind of laughed and said that it was just something I knew how to do. Unsatisfied with the answer he told me to read it again and he gazed into my eyes again and asked me "do you turn your eyes upside down?" So of course I acted like I was turning them back to normal looked at him and said "yep". He sat there speechless for a couple of minutes haha. My students are in such awe of me and my amazing talents they believe I have.
Thanks for sharing Andy. Aren't you glad your dad taught you how to draw that tree?!!!!!!
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