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.
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