Alta Vista Construction

We had a lot of things going on this week, but the biggest thing was our construction at the Alta Vista site. We had talked last week about things we wanted to do in the community and one of the things that came up was building shelters at the feeding sites around the island that didn't have them. We decided we all wanted to help with that and get it going. We have a contractor on our team and so he's been looking around at the different sites to get ideas and figure out the least expensive way to build the best shelters we can. We decided this week that we were going to start by repairing one of the shelters at a site on the other side of the island. The shelter was built a long time ago and it was in really bad shape so we decided to fix it up to get some experience with building them and figuring out how to do everything. This site needed a lot of work but fortunately not a whole lot of supplies. We got there and figured out what supplies we needed and went to the lumberyard to order them. While we were waiting for the materials we got the place cleaned up and ready to go. There are benches all the way along two sides of the shelter for the kids to sit during the feeding. They were really beat up and broken in a lot of areas. We needed to fix the supports that held the benches up. Several of them had rotted out or were just missing. So some of the team started on that while me and the contractor tried to figure out how to fix a nepa roof. Luckily we had a Filipino man come start working on the roof for us which was awesome because we definitely didn't know how we were going to do it efficiently or effectively. So we started working on cutting the braces for the benches to support the bamboo that goes across the top to sit on. We needed to put in new ones or replace a lot of the ones already there. Two things I learned pretty quickly are that most Americans aren't very good with a hand saw, the contractor and I were really the only ones who could use it, and also that banana wood is very tough, and Filipino nails not so much. It was so hard trying to nail all the way through the wood. The nails here are so weak that if you don't hit it exactly square on it'll completely bend and it's a lost cause. I did a lot of sawing and nailing. We also needed to put more bamboo slats in some areas of the bench where they were missing or broken to be able to finish the benches.

Our contractor working on one of the braces, with some kids taking notes.

One of our missionary kids nailing a bamboo slat down on the bench.

A kid from the community helping put a bamboo slat on the bench.

This girl got the nickname Miss Muscles. She tried to take over for everybody. She would have built the whole thing if we would have let her. I have never seen a 10 year girl hammer so well. She saw Carla miss the nail and shook her head and took the hammer from her haha.

Miss Muscles nailing down a new piece of bamboo onto the bench. I was willing to hold the bamboo down for her, but I wasn't going to hold the nail, she hits it way to hard.

Another one of our MKs nailing down the bamboo on the bench.

The best part of the whole thing was definitely the fact that everyone helped chip in. On Saturday we had a couple people help us with things and the guy who did the roof, and some kids who tried to help, but on Sunday we had everyone helping us. We had women from the community, teenage boys, teenage girls, little kids, and even this little guy going around with his rock trying to nail anything he decided needed it. It was so awesome to see the community come in and take ownership of the shelter and show us how much it meant to them. We could have done the whole thing by ourselves but it was so much better for them to be able to put their own wok into it because it makes it so much more meaningful to their community. We were overjoyed to see how much the community put into fixing the shelter up and it really made us feel so much better about putting in our time and money to fix it to know that it wasn't taken for granted by the community. They truly were grateful for our help and wanted to have the shelter be nice and were willing to put in the work to be able to get it fixed up but probably just didn't have the money to do it themselves.

Another thing we needed to do was fix the walls. The walls had bamboo slats going up along the sides the whole way around but a lot of them were missing, or the nails had come out. We made new slats to replace the sections of the walls missing them. We also went around nailing the slats back onto the wall and also using some tie to keep them there for a long time. This boy was nailing some slats down.

The girls went around tying the slats so they wouldn't fall off again.

We had some teenage boys help us out at times which was really awesome. A lot of the teenage boys stay away from the sites because it's just not "cool". They think it's for kids and like teenagers anywhere have a lot of pride and rebellion that keeps them from wanted to be involved in church activities or the feeding sites. To have a couple of the teenagers around helping was awesome and I really hope we were able to reach out to them in a way that made them more attached to the community and to the church.

Whether they were hammering or tying, the girls did a ton of work on the site. They were always helping with something.

Me with some help from two of our MKs putting some slats up on the walls.

Making the bamboo slats. We had a piece of bamboo and a machete and turned it into slats for the benches and the walls. They used the machete to split the bamboo into strips and then shave them until they were clean.

One of the biggest jobs we had was fixing the holes in the roof. We had four holes that we needed to fix and we really weren't sure exactly how to do it. We could see how to do it if you were started from scratch and doing the whole roof, but to patch we really weren't sure how we'd do it. Luckily as our contractor and I were looking pretty clueless up in the rafters trying to figure it out we had a Filipino man who knew how to do it volunteer to help us. He patched the biggest hole on Saturday for us. On Sunday we had one big one and two smaller ones to do. One of missionaries had watched the man do it the day before so she decided to give it a try. She patched up the hole with the help of some of the kids.

Some of te boys climbed up to help with the roof, but were soon kicked out by the girls.

The girls took over and helped get the hole patched up. It was actually really amazing to see them take over and do such an awesome job fixing it.

Almost done. This was the last picture I was able to take before my batteries died, so unfortunately I don't have any finished pictures which is definitely a bummer. We were only able to do one hole at a time because we only had one piece of wood that could hold us to to be able to put up in the rafters. But that didn't stop some of the girls to go start fixing the other holes while Carla and Miss Muscles were finishing this hole. They were light enough and flexible enough to just hang from the bamboo. I was amazed by those girls and I really wish I would have been able to take pictures of them up there doing it.

 A view from the front of the shelter.

This was funny at the time seeing this little girl trying to carry around the hammer. Unfortunately it became less funny later when she used it to hit a little boy on top of the head. Luckily he wasn't hurt bad or anything it was more of just a tap, but she was so cute and innocent until you gave her a weapon and then she turned into a bully.

Using a crate and a string as a sled. This kid was pretty tough, he was getting pulled around pretty roughly and he wasn't wearing any pants, and there were holes all along the bottom of the crate. That couldn't have felt good at all.

We should have known not to give her a hammer when she was using a piece of bamboo as a sword.

If these girls don't make you smile I don't know what will.

Another exciting thing to happen this week was the girls basketball tournament in Manila we sent our girls team from Boracay to. We sent to of our MKs, three daughters of our Filipino staff, two Ati girls from Carla Village, a girl we met while playing basketball a couple months ago and a couple other girls from a high school on Boracay, and Shane, one of my 5th graders from Agape. They were in Manila for 5 days while they played in their tournament. They did incredible in the tournament and took 2nd overall, which was especially incredible because they were playing against high school teams and these girls had never played all together before this tournament at all. The school putting on the tournament scheduled us the first game and we beat them and then continued to win until the championship game. Even more awesome than how well we did though was the experience the girls were able to have. I don't think any of the Filipino girls had been to Manila before and had never experienced a trip like this. Our principal had her daughters playing on the team so her family all went on the trip and she said this about it:
"I feel so blessed to witness a day of "firsts" for many of the girls we brought with us on this trip ... first time to Manila, first time to a mall, first time up an escalator, first time buying/wearing shoes, first time at Wendys....and that is all before the BB tourney! Seeing the world through their eyes and GIANT smiles is so so fun! Joy is contagious!"
The girls had an amazing trip and did so many things they would never gotten to do normally if it wasn't for this tournament and the people who supported them financially to go. I am so glad I was able to financially support my 5th grader to go on this trip and to experience Manila and everything they did there. 

another thing that happened this week was an English Contest on the other island. We had students from our school go to compete this Saturday in different competitions. Unfortunately the contest didn't separate the competition in grade levels so all of our kids were competing in basically the grade 6 level. One of our sixth graders took 3rd place in the poetry contest. One of my fifth graders took 2nd place in the essay writing contest. We were really excited about how well they did and how well all of our students did. There were a lot of schools at the contest and we were able to show the skills our students have in English.
We have a lot of things going on and things are going really well at the school and on the island. It is so great to start to do more things and see more things happen. We are continuing to try to do more and figure out more ways to make an impact on our students and our community. Thank you for your support and helping me be here to be able to be part of these things.

Rejuvenated

I'm back on Boracay, and now back into my normal routine. I dealt with a couple weeks of jet lag and a cold while trying to get back into school and back into my normal schedule. It took a while but I'm finally settled down and feeling better. It feels so great to be healthy and it's amazing how much more energy I have and how much easier things are now. It's not fun being sick anywhere, but it's just so much harder to deal with when you're here. It's also so much nicer teaching when you feel well than when you're sick. I'm so glad to be feeling better and am so grateful for all the prayers that I got from people here, and from everyone back at home.
There were a few other missionaries who went home over Christmas break and the rest of them were able to have a couple weeks to relax and rejuvenate. We have all come back rejuvenated and it is awesome because we are able to really refocus on what we want to do here and we now have the energy and focus back to be able to do it. One of the amazing things about our group is there have been so many times where things seem to hit us all at the same time. We all just happen to feel like we need to do something and we bring it up and realize we were all thinking it and decide to do it. We have all been feeling since we've been back that we want to do more than we've been doing. We have started to move dirt at the school on Tuesday afternoons. We have a ton of dirt and rocks to move as we are digging out areas where we are enlarging the school. We depend on short term teams for a lot of the work to be done since there is so much. Teams have been digging and moving dirt for years here as the school has been built. We do it and other construction things over the summer break, but we have decided to start doing it now to help with the process. It's a lot of work and it's not easy work in the heat and humidity here. One of the missionaries here is a contractor and he's been trying to find ways to do different things around the island. There are some of the feeding sites around the island that have shelters built to be able to have the feedings in, and they are so great to have in times when it rains and just in general to keep the kids inside and places to sit and do everything that needs to be done. There are also a lot of feedings that don't have shelters built. Some of the missionaries that are serving at the sites without shelters have brought up the idea of building some. We are in the process of going around and getting ideas from the shelters and seeing how we can build affordable shelters at the different sites. We went around and looked at some examples on Sunday and Brian will be coming up with ideas of how to build the best shelters in the most affordable ways. It is something as a staff we decided we wanted to pitch in to helping do this and getting shelters for as many of the sites as we can. So there is a lot of construction in our future.
We have also decided as a staff to get together and put together our English textbooks for next year. Our textbooks are very expensive and our English textbooks are just not very good. They are written in Manila and just have a lot of incorrect grammar and spellings and just not a whole lot of good resources. We have a lot of great resources at the school for teaching English but they are in so many different books and so we decided we want to go through the materials we have and put together the books for each grade next year based on the Dep Ed standards and in the way we feel can best teach it effectively for the level the students are at. It is going to be a huge project to try to organize everything and put everything together but I think it is going to be such an awesome tool to have next year to teach from and will be such and improvement. It will also be a lot cheaper for us to put the book together and send it to be copied and printed then it would be to purchase textbooks from a company. A lot of our families struggle with affording the textbooks and so we want to be able to have the cheapest possible textbooks for our students. We do a lot to be able to provide the education, but we just don't have the financial ability to provide free textbooks so we are trying to find the most inexpensive books to help with the families who just don't have the money.
Over Christmas break we had a girls basketball tournament on the island. We had a team from Agape, a couple other teams from the island, a team from the Ati village, and some teams from Faith Academy in Manila. It was an 8 team tournament and the Agape team took second to a team from Faith Academy. Our success got us invited to a tournament this week in Manila. We wanted to send a team of girls from our staff, our school, and also some talented girls from the island that w wanted to be able to get some recognition in Manila and possibly scholarship opportunities. The problem was that the trip was about 50 dollars per girl for the boat ride to Manila and back and also for food and transportation in Manila during their stay. Seven of the nine girls we were sending over aren't able to afford the trip and so they needed to be sponsored. One of our girls is one of my 5th graders and so I decided that I wanted to sponsor her to be able to go. She is a really good basketball player and she is a great student. I want to be able to help her in what she does and give her this awesome opportunity to go to Manila to play in this tournament. A couple of the other missionaries also decided to sponsor a girl and the Beavers found supporters of First Love who wanted to pitch in to support the girls to go. It's awesome to see the opportunity these girls have with this because of the support people were willing to give for them and it's awesome to be part of that. And to all of my financial sponsors you are able to be a part of that.
The other awesome thing that we have decided as a staff is that we want to get together even more often to have time to pray and talk abut things. We have made small groups to be able to meet and we're also meeting with everyone more often. It is awesome because we all really just felt that we needed this time and we wanted to be able to spend more time together in a more serious manner. We have spent a lot of time getting to know each other and having fun together and we want to use the comfort that we have with each other to grow and encourage one another as we go through the hard things that we deal with in day to day life. We are very excited about it and I am very excited about it. It's hard to go through things here and it makes things so much easier when you have people there for you through everything going on.
We are also currently in the process of planning for next school year and we have a lot of decisions that need to be made and we need to figure a lot of things out for what we want to do with the school and how we are going to keep the costs of the school down enough to keep our mission of providing education for students from families who can't afford to pay for an education anywhere else. There are a lot of costs that come up with the school growing and an increased number of Filipino teachers to pay. We are trying to find ways to be able to continue to allow the school take in more students while finding ways to be able to afford all of our costs. Please pray for our administration and our leaders who need to make a lot of complicated decisions on the future of our school. Most importantly pray that our mission of providing education to underprivileged children will be the biggest priority in the decision making. We are all praying that we are able to find ways to keep costs down as low as possible as well as praying for more funds to be coming into the school from supporters.
We have a lot going on right now so I hope I am able to keep up with everything going on and keep you informed of it all. Just to make sure this blog wasn't to boring I must add a story from earlier this week. So I was getting over my cold and I had a lot of stuff to do for school and finally got it all finished and was ready to go to bed. I walk out of my bathroom head towards the light switch to turn it off and up above my bed I see this.

A giant spider just hanging out on the wall above my bed. These guys are normally the size of your hand or bigger, this guy was a little smaller so that was a minor positive. They are also a lot faster than humans which obviously makes things even worse. So there was no way I was going to sleep with that thing sitting there above my bed, it just wasn't going to happen. So I knew I was going to have to stay up until it was dead, and I honestly didn't know if that would even be possible. There is no way I was going to be able to catch the thing because it's so fast and I knew I wasn't going to sleep if it was in my room somewhere. So first off i had to take a picture of it, which I took from the other side of my room because I really wasn't feeling like getting a close up of it. So my next step was to try to kill the thing. I had my flip flop but I knew there was no way I was going to be able t get close enough to it and be fast enough to even hit it. So I had to daze it. So I had my bug spray in my left hand, flip flop in my right. Hopped up on my bed and I was ready to rumble. I then realized I needed to set up my camera on the table to record this, but the spider started taking off so I wasn't able to. He ran into the corner and I knew I had to get him now before he went behind my shelves. So I sprayed him in the face and amazingly it really did daze him. He took off running and I made a leap off my bed landing on my suitcase and into my shelves but was able to slap the spider dad in the center with my flip flop. Amazingly I was able to kill the spider without breaking anything, besides the spiders entire body. I survived with only a little bruise on my hip from hitting the shelf corner, but I looked a lot better than the spider. It was definitely really epic, and probably a lot more epic than it sounds on here. I really wish I could have gotten it on camera, but oh well. I was pretty happy with my victory for a few minutes until I realized that there could literally be a giant spider in my room at anytime. I have been extremely paranoid this last week in everything I do. I scan my whole room before I go to bed at night. I definitely won the battle, but I'm not sure if I've won the war.

I'm Back!

I'm back! It's good to be back and get into the swing of things. There were a lot of things I missed, but also some things I definitely didn't miss too much. It only took me 5 days to get sick, so that hasn't been too much fun trying to deal with while catching up and getting everything going with school again. It has been a much better welcome back to the island than my first time coming and being sick for a week and a half, but it still hasn't been great. Because of everything going on before I left I wasn't able to adjust my sleep schedule at all so I was welcomed back with a heavy dose of jet lag. I started school the day after I got in so I didn't do much other than go to school then go back to bed. As soon as I started getting rid of the jet lag I picked up a cold so I've been doing nothing but going to school and sleeping really since I've been back.
It was awesome to be able to go home over break to see my grandma and be with my family and I have a lot of great memories from my time there, but I was really ready to come back to Boracay. It's nice to see family and eat awesome foods I hadn't had for awhile, but I missed everything that is going on here. It was interesting going home and seeing peoples responses to me and it was a lot different than I thought. There were a lot of luxuries at home but it was a lot different than I was expecting.
I posted this to facebook when I got back here and I figured I'd share it here.
You know you're in the Philippines when:
1. Within 5 minutes of arriving at the airport there's a band singing "heeeeyyy sessy lady".
2. Within 5 minutes of putting on a new shirt its completely soaked (and it's not raining).
3. Within 5 seconds of poking my head inside my classroom there are 16 screaming kids climbing on me.
The last one kind of makes it all worth it.
That does a decent job of summing it up. Gangnam style is by far the most popular songs here and it gets played over and over wherever you go. I was hoping it would be gone by the time I got back but as I was in the airport in Manila a band was playing and the second song I heard was gangnam style. They played it about every fourth song they played. The gangnam style phase definitely isn't over yet. It was around 40 degrees most of the time when I was home and I came back to weather that has actually been really nice for here but it's still 80 degrees and extremely humid. You sweat without even moving and there's nothing you can really do except just live with it. When I got into Boracay I took my bags home and went over to the school to surprise my class. I peeked my head inside the door and they erupted. It was one of those moments I wish I had been recording because they just went crazy. They immediately all came running and screaming at me and I wasn't even able to get inside the classroom for five minutes until they finally all let go. The best reaction was from one of my boys who is normally very quiet. He sits on the far side of the class and when I looked into the room everyone was runing and screaming, but John Lester was jumping up and down screaming at the top of his lungs and was almost at tears. He looked like a 15 year old girl at a Justin Bieber concert. It was pretty amazing. One of my girls said Mr. Schmidt we were worried about you. I guess I'm not allowed to miss a day of school without it being something tragic. It was really cool to see how excited they were to see me again though and it definitely makes it a lot easier to deal with the little things. 
I showed my students a slideshow of pictures and videos I took from home of Escalon, Yosemite, and the snow. They loved seeing the pictures and definitely the pictures of the snow and the videos of me sledding and tackling the snowman we made. It was a lot of fun being able to show them my home and let them see things that haven't seen before. Other than that we've been just reviewing for our third quarter exams coming up in a couple days.  I am also temporarily teaching the 6th grade class for English until their teacher gets back. It's also been rough this week because so many of us have been sick so everyone is trying to cover for everybody. If you could please pray for our staff and our health right now. There's a lot going around and so many of us are dealing with things. 
Other than that I don't have a lot of news. I have been sleeping most of the time I've been back trying to deal with my jet lag and my cold. I wish I had more for you but I really haven't been out and about much. I do have a funny story from class though. The other day after answering a question correctly one of my second graders stands up and says 'I did that with my brain' and then pretends to telepathically read my mind for the answers. It was definitely one of the funnier things I've seen in class, and so very random. 
I haven't had the chance to take any pictures since I've been back, but here are a couple of Manila. I was able to spend some time in Manila while I was waiting for my flight back home and it was amazing to see how huge it was and how many people were there. It made LA look small. These pictures were taken from pretty high up and I'm not sure exactly what part of the city geographically we were but the city just goes on for ever there's no stop to it. It was also the craziest driving I've ever seen. I thought Guatemala City was crazy but it was nothing compared to Manila.