Random Topic Week

This week has been a nice week to be able to relax and also have some fun on our week off of school. I spent a lot of my time hanging out and playing games with the other missionaries. I was also able to catch up on a little bit of sleep which was very nice. On Wednesday several of us went to Ariel's point to cliff dive. It is about a 30 minute boat ride to the other island where the cliff diving location is. It is a day long thing and the place provides an awesome lunch as well. It was an awesome day and was so much fun. The place is set up on some cliffs and they have several planks set up at different heights to jump from. They had planks at 2 meters, 3m, 5m, 7m, 8m, and 15m. The ocean was also great for snorkeling. I was excited to go because I love cliff diving and was really excited to be able to do it. What I realized after a while was it was a lot more fun to watch people challenge themselves and do things they didn't think they could do. Right away when we got there I went off of the highest planks and they were really fun and I did them some more throughout the day, but I spent most of the day watching everyone else. It was a lot of fun watching the kids slowly making their way up from plank to plank. I was with Biz (the youngest missionary kid with us) a lot of the day and he worked his way up to diving from each rung of the latter, to diving from the 3m plank. He also worked up to jumping off of the 8m (which by the way is really high, about 26 ft.) It was so fun encouraging him and cheering him on and then so awesome when he would come up out of the water and being so stoked that he had done it.

Biz thinking about jumping off the 5m plank early in the day.

We also spent the last 10 minutes of the day trying to encourage one of the principal's daughters to jump from the 15m (49 ft) plank. She was up there but had made the mistake of looking down. We were cheering her on for about 10 minutes before she finally jumped and ended the day off well.

This picture is awesome on several levels. First it was the last jump of the day and one of the highlights with her getting up the courage to jump from the 15m plank. But it is also awesome because out of my excitement I threw my hands up and perfectly got into this picture, and I think I may have a career in hand modeling.  By the way the plank is above the picture and she still has a ways to hitting the water, 49 ft is a long drop.

This is the point as we were pulling up in the boat. You can see a couple of the planks.

We also had a birthday party this week. Which was fun and very interesting at the same time. We had balloon animals for all the kids that showed up and they had games, and dancing, and all sorts of fun. Then they got out the pinata. Which wasnt actually a pinata but a clay pot full of candy. Some of the things that they do in the Philippines just make you wonder sometimes. First you've got a dizzy, blindfolded kid with a giant bamboo stick swinging it while there are forty kids as close as possible to the center. Second you've got a clay pot that's going to shatter everywhere when it gets hit. Third you've got 40 kids who would probably all jump off a bridge to be able to get a piece of candy and they're all going to be going after it regardless of the broken pot all over the place. One of the kids hit the pot and part of it broke off with the rest of the pot just dangling up above all the kids going after the candy that had fallen, I thought for sure it was going to break and fall on the kids, it was such a scary moment. So then I thought they were going to get the rest of the candy out and be done, but nope, they tied the next kid up and kept going. I really thought it was going to fall on the kids the next time it was hit but luckily when it got hit it all broke so there were only some minor issues of the pieces hitting kids. I thought it was insane, but it's just one of those things you just have to go along with, luckily no one got hurt, miraculously.

 The kids surrounding the pinata.

Yeah, crazy right?

So since we're on the topic of interesting things that people do here, here are a few more. When it rains here people will be walking down the street in a t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops getting soaked, but they will have a plastic bag over their head because if you get rain water on your head you will get sick. People and kids where a towel on their back basically like the opposite of a cape because if you let sweat just sit on your back you will get sick. If you jump rope you will have an appendicitis because there was a kid one time that had his appendix burst while jump roping. Antibiotics are used here like tylenol is used in the US. You dont need a prescription for anything so they just take antibiotics for everything. If you have a cold take antibiotics, a fever take antibiotics, a hang nail take antibiotics, a stubbed toe take antibiotics. It is pretty crazy how much they get taken for everything and anytime we have anything wrong with us we get offered antibiotics.
The craziest thing I think I have found out is that on test day for my fifth graders I bought them bananas to eat as a snack between their tests and half of them wouldn't eat the bananas because they were ripe and had some brown spots on them. This is an island that lives off of rice, mangoes, and bananas and they don't eat ripe bananas? They told me the brown spots are viruses and they'll get sick if they eat them. It has been interesting teaching some health subjects and teaching about the body and hearing all of the old wive's tales they have here and how many people actually believe them and how ingrained the kids have it in themselves too.
It seemed like there was so much going no this week, but there really wasn't very many things to write about, and sorry again for my lack of a camera. I really wish I could get you more pictures of things. Here are some other random things going on in my world.
The last day of testing got rained out last week before vacation and so we had to postpone it until yesterday. I was really worried that my kids would struggle with the tests after having the week off but I graded their tests today and they did so well. I was so stoked grading the tests. The science test was really tough and they still did well on it. They also did extremely on their English test. I was so happy they did so well because it really showed me that they were learning what I was teaching them and they were even able to hold onto it a week after we reviewed it. I was really excited during the day. Then tonight my partner teacher for 2nd grade informed me that 2 of our kids had failed English this quarter. It wasn't really surprising, but it was really depressing. It created quite a dilemma because if they fail a quarter here they have to redo the 2nd grade. The biggest problem is that teachers in the Philippines don't fail kids. It just doesn't happen. These kids just don't know any English and they are so far behind where they should be. Passing them is just going to set them up for failure in the third grade because they aren't even at the 2nd grade level there is no way they will be able to handle the 3rd grade level. I think the best thing for them to do is to be able to take grade 2 over so that they can catch up to where they need to be or at least hopefully get close enough that maybe they can handle grade 3. Unfortunately holding kids back here just doesn't send that same message here. It creates a very hard situation that just doesn't seem to have a right answer. I'm going to be talking with the principal about it to try to figure it out but it is just a really tough situation.
Please pray for my kids as well as for the situation that we will be able to find the best situations for them to be able to succeed.
So I don't know if you know but apparently there is an election going on today in the US. If I wasn't searching for news about it I honestly probably wouldn't even know about it. It is pretty surprising how hard it is to find out what's going on with it. I mean I understand this is a different country and I wasn't expecting it to be a big deal here, but it is still a little surprising that it isn't even really mentioned anywhere.
Sorry for the lack of smoothness between topics, this is random topic week apparently. This week in church was another typical week in church where I didn't really understand a lot of what was going on because of the tagalog mixed in with the English. I didn't follow along with a lot of the message but the part I did get was the message of basically going hard or going home. He didn't use those words obviously, but that's basically what I got out of it. This life is really all or nothing. We have a certain amount of time here and we can spend it working for God or working for ourselves. So many times we spend it trying to decide which one to do. And then there are certain times when it hits you that it just doesn't make any sense to go halfway, to sit on the fence. If we are going to believe that God is real and He is calling us to do something it just doesn't make a lot of sense worrying about anything else. We worry about money, about safety, about health, about all sorts of things, but we forget that God's got things under control and we are here for Him not for ourselves. Things have been awesome here but I'm not going to say that things have easy all the time. I had a lot of opportunities to do a lot of different things back home and I can sit back and think about them and think about the things I am missing out on or I could throw everything in to what I am doing here and give it all I've got to do what I know that I have been placed here to do. I could give up and say this isn't worth it or things aren't going the way I want them to go or I could put my trust in God that things are happening for a reason and I just need to keep following and He will work out the details. I didn't come to this island for me. I didn't come here for anything I would get out of it, but I came here for God and to give myself to what He wanted. I am going to give my all and I'm going to go hard because there's just no point in sort of trying, or doing decent. There's no point in giving part of my effort to teach these kids or part of my effort to share Christ with people, I might as well go home if that was my goal.
It has been difficult sometimes here because you really start to realize all the things you are missing out on back home. The fun things, the food, the opportunities, and the people. It can be hard, but the thing you don't see is all of the things I have here that I'd be missing out on if I was back home. I miss a lot of things and people from back home, but I know I wouldn't be able to handle missing out on everything I have been given here. Part of life is missing out on things. We always want what we don't have or what someone else has. We want to be somewhere else, or someone else. When we are kids we live our whole lives wishing we could be adults and do all the awesome adult things. When we become adults we spend our lives wishing we were younger and could do the things like we did when we were younger.
We need to be happy with where we are,
be happy with who you are,
strive to be the best you can be,
go where you are sent,
don't live life focused on what you don't have,
but make every moment with what you do have special.