Cagban Site Construction

After a week of being sick, I was able to get back to being healthy and got to do some things. We've been busy lately with so many different things going on in school, trying to get things done this year and also preparing for next year. It is crazy to think we only have 7 weeks left of the school year. The year went so fast and it seems like it just started. I am very glad that I will be back next year and I'm really excited about what I'll be able to do next year  now that I have a year here and know how to do things and how things have worked this year. I am so excited to be able to use the things I've found to be successful for an entire year next year instead of just half the year of finding things out. It's also exciting that we'll have a lot of the missionary teachers back next year to be able to build on what we've done this year. One of the biggest changes we are making next year is that we are hoping to have twice as many students next year, which is really exciting yet also a little worrying because of the fact that we need to get almost twice as many teachers to be able to support all of the students and I don't know how we are going to do that. We have a lot of our Filipino teachers leaving after this year and we should be able to get more Filipino teachers but as of now we have as many missionaries leaving as we do coming so we're still praying about that and being able to continue to provide our students with quality education and quality English education. We are doing a lot right now to try to get things ready for next year and one of the big things we are doing is putting together the English curriculum for all of the grades next year. We are building our own textbooks to both save money but also to be able to have more fitting and effective books for our students. It is a lot of work but it is going very well so far. Two of the missionaries are working on K-2nd grade and two of us are working on the 3-6th grade curriculum. It has been a really neat process because I don't know what I am doing after next year but putting together this curriculum is awesome to see how God is just giving me even more experience and opening up more opportunities for me in the future.
After being sick and having my feeding site be cancelled one week, I was able to get back to my feeding site last week and was so happy to be there again. I missed my kids and was just as happy to see them again as they were to see me. It has been so awesome to get to know all of the kids and become part of the community.
Even more exciting than being back at the site was this weekend being able to go to Cagban to be able to repair the site. Our building was in very rough shape and definitely needed a lot of repair. The walls were broken and one side was completely falling off. There was a large hole in the roof that needed repair and the the sides of the building needed some work to help keep the rain out. We also only have one bench in the building so we needed to build a bench on the other side so that we'd have room for all of the kids to be able to sit. It was so awesome to show up at the site and have all of the kids so happy to see me and then be able to fix up the building and really see how much it meant to the kids and the community.

The wall on this side was half gone and even the post on the front corner needed to be replaced to be able to hold the building up.

Adding a post to the center of the back wall to make it stronger.

Cutting bamboo. The entire building is made out of bamboo. Besides the nepa roof and the nails it is bamboo from top to bottom. Which is nice in the sense that it is extremely cheap for us to buy. Even the ladder was made out of bamboo. We asked if anyone had a ladder we could use to be able to get up to fix the roof and a man from the village went to our pile of bamboo and started to cut it into pieces and within 10 minutes had a ladder up in the building.

We were blessed again with people from the village who were willing to help and jumped right up to do the roof. The lady that cooks for our feeding jumped up there and started working on the roof. they tore all of the broken nepa out to get it ready to fix.

After fixing the hole in the roof in about a quarter of the time it would have taken us, they started adding nepa to the side to kept it a little more rainproof from the side.

We added a bench a long the entire side of the building. We had a bench on the other side and we copied that bench and duplicated it for the other side. We got the bench built but didn't get to finish the backrest or the slats on top of the bench. One of the ladies who is a leader in the village told us not to worry about it, she would put the men from the village to work on finishing when they got home from work. It made us laugh how she said it, but it was really cool to see the community coming together to finish it up and be able to put their own mark on it. That's what we really want to be able to do because these buildings are like community centers for these villages. They are used for so much more than just our feedings and it's awesome for us to be able to mostly just provide the money to buy the materials and the community is willing to fix it up. We love doing it and don't mind putting in the labor at all, but it really is awesome to see the people be able to take ownership of their building.

Our missionary kids are a huge blessing to the mission here and are able to connect to the kids here in so many different ways.

Putting up the wall.

Everyone helping out, taking the nepa up the ladder.

It is always fun to hang out with my kids and it was nice to be able to take some time off of the building to hang out with them.

They love playing frisbee, I bring my frisbee every week to be able to throw around.

Russ cutting a piece to use for the bench, while it is being used as a jungle gym at the same time.

Perfectly placed moose antlers. You can't do it much better than that.

I love these kids and all of the kids from the community that I am blessed to be able to work with every week.

Some other exciting things to happen this week were my stating to learn some Tagalog. I have had an idea to have my 5th graders teach me some tagalog but I was trying to find ways for them to do it where they were able to still learn and not just spend class time for me to learn. What I decided to do was have them create a spelling list for me. I have 12 students and they each come up with one word. The rules are that they have to be able to spell it correctly and have to be able to tell me what the word means in English. I think it definitely has educational value to them in working with vocab. They have to tie words from their own language into descriptions in English. It is also a ton of fun for them and it also is a way for me to show interest in them and their culture. I think that that is really one of the most important parts of it. I come into their country and spend so much time teaching my language and my culture and I think they really thought it was cool to see me be able to show visible interest in them and their culture. The deal is that on Fridays they have their spelling quiz in Englishand then I have my spelling quiz in Tagalog. For every word I spell incorrectly they get an extra point on their quiz. Unfortunately for them I'm super smart so I got 100% on my first quiz last week. Hopefully I'll be able to do it again this week.
Also last week one of the Filipino teachers offered to give Tagalog lessons to anyone who wanted them. So five of us showed up to get lessons. We had a fun time and definitely learned a little bit. It's not easy learning a language. The biggest thing that I have gotten out of it is learning how hard it truly is for these kids trying to learn English and I've learned a lot about what parts of it are the most difficult and how certain students struggle in certain areas for different reasons. It is helping me become better at teaching them English just because it gives me experience in seeing what they are dealing with.
We have a team here right now of 30 or 40 people working at the school and the feeding sites. It is always nice having a team here to give our kids some extra tutoring time and also all of the construction they do. They make such a huge impact here and provide so much extra help to the teachers and staff here at the school. This is a painting they did on a wall in our school today. Like all maps of the Earth made in the Philippines it's opposite of what ours looks like, but it is an awesome painting to have up and was cool for them to be able to use some of our kids for the handprints.

We are currently having registration for next year at school this week and are doing a lot of things for next year. We are busy preparing and praying for next year. Please pray for our school and our mission here of being able to provide quality education to these kids who don't have the ability to afford it anywhere else. Pray that God would deliver our teachers and staff and would provide us with everything we need to run the school effectively. We believe in what we are doing here and we are confident that God will continue to provide everything we need to be able to keep expanding His kingdom here at the school. Thank you so much for your prayer and support.