Trusting God

It's been a while since my last post, and as much as I keep making excuses I really do wish I was able to keep up better. This month has been very challenging and full of a lot of changes and work. I have spent a large amount of my time on my computer researching and writing things and I haven't had a shortage of things to do.  I'm not really a sit down and focus kind of person, I'm much more of a get out and do person so it has been a challenge for me for so much of what I've needed to do involve sitting on my computer. School starts a week from now and this last month has been trying to get everything prepared for the school year. It hasn't been an easy task. We had 170 students in the school last year and we had a huge overflow of registration this year, but we had to cut down to about 270 students for this year. We simply didn't have any more room, and even with that we still have larger class sizes than we wanted to have. It has been a lot of work to prepare the school for that huge of an increase of students. It just so happened that God put me in a position to be a big part of it.
One of the hardest things to write about in a blog is when things aren't going great. It is easy to put on a smiley face and tell everybody how great everything and everybody's happy. But I'm not going to do that. There have been a lot of challenges here. Being a missionary is not an easy thing to do. Working for a mission organization is not an easy thing to do. If you know me well, you know how much passion burns inside of me for what I do, and that is a typical trait of missionaries. Sometimes though when you get a room full of missionaries with strong passions, those passions don't always agree. Working in a mission organization that happens. There are the top guys back in the states, the middle men in Manila, and then us working in the school and in the ministry on Boracay. Everyone has different perspectives and everyone has different levels of power. We've had so many changes and so many things going on that so many things happen from so many different levels and with so many different goals. It can be hard to handle. We've had some missionaries leave at the end of their time, and we've had some missionaries leave early. As far as we know there aren't any new long term missionaries coming yet this year. That leaves just a few of us here. There are five of us here with one more possibly coming back in July. One of the five is taking care of medical issues in Carla Village on Panay, one is working on curriculum and teaching strategies in the school in Carla, one is here for a youth program called Younglife that he's running on the island while also assisting in Kinder at the school when he's available, and one is running 5 feeding sites a week with a huge focus on working in those communities while assisting in nursery at the school. Then there's me. My biggest focus is at the school and because of the lack of missionaries focused on the school my responsibility within the school has skyrocketed over the summer. I have been able to take on things that I'm very excited about, and head to take on things that have definitely been out of my comfort zone and have challenged me. I asked God to feel needed here, to see my purpose and see that there was a reason I was here and not somewhere else, and He certainly made it clear to me.
Sometimes it's easy to feel like a pon when you're down so low on the totem pole and just following decisions made from a distance, but this summer I have gotten to spend a lot of time with our Pastora who runs the ministry and the school here. She is one of the most remarkable ladies I've ever met and I wish I had the same energy source as she does. She runs the church with her husband, she runs the feeding sites throughout the island, she is constantly doing Bible studies and other forms of community outreach, and she is running the entire school. I honestly don't know how she does it. Spending time with her though this summer at the school has been so refreshing. Being able to see her passions for the ministry and the school and being on the same page as her in everything she is trying to do has been amazing. Even more amazing is that she has seen my passion and my willingness to serve and has given me responsibility. Sometimes more than I had hoped for, but it has all worked out and been great. It is so refreshing in the midst of chaos to have someone on the same page and someone who is able to trust me to do things and someone I can trust to lead me in the right direction.
This summer I have been in charge of a lot of things. Pastora wanted me to choose the textbooks for next year that we would use in the school. I spent the end of last year putting together the English books for grade 4 and 5 and am still putting together a PE resource book. I was also in charge of looking through 3 different companies to decide which English, math, science, and mapeh books we would use. So I spent a lot of time looking through textbooks trying to pick the textbooks that would fit our students and teachers the best. I have honestly spent more time in textbooks this last 4 months than I did in my entire collegiate career.
I have had a lot of different responsibilities throughout the summer but the one that was the most difficult was being asked to help interview our new teachers. We kept 2 Filipino teachers from last year and have a lot more classes to fill this year so we needed to hire a lot of new teachers. So Pastor, Pastora, and myself spent the day a couple weeks ago interviewing potential teachers. It felt so weird at times being there and being trusted with such a hugely important task. We sat through the whole morning watching all of the teachers give a demo lesson. Afterwards Pastora and I met one on one with all of the teachers, which was also very weird for me. She met with them and was the primary interviewer and to ask all the important stuff. My job was to talk to them about their demo lesson and give any advice or praise that I felt like giving and then ask anything I felt was relevant to what they did or what they would be doing. I also asked them about their church and about their faith and how they felt about our ministry because I thought it might be a more open conversation than with Pastora. It was definitely an experience I didn't feel super prepared for and was definitely a little out of my comfort zone, but I think it was good. I got to encourage the teachers with the things they did well in their lessons and also got to ask some questions that I was able to let Pastora know about. We hired 12 new teachers and almost all of them are brand new teachers right out of school and a lot of them are 21-22 years old. We are really excited about the teachers because our number one criteria for hiring them was their faith. We feel like we have some very solid teachers in their faith and some who are growing and are very open to what God is doing in placing them in this ministry. We have a huge opportunity to lead and encourage the teachers in their teaching and in their faith.
As for the school year, it is not yet determined what exactly I will be doing. I had my ideas and things I pictured myself doing, but a lot has changed this summer. Pastora had mentioned things she thought I could do this year at different times and I never really knew what exactly I would do. So when I was talking to Pastora and she asked me what I wanted to do I basically told her that I trust what she's doing in the school, I trust her goals and what she sees that needs to be done. I am here to serve and I will do whatever it is she wants me to do. It was a little hard to surrender myself simply because there are things I want to do that I might not be doing and I'm obviously opening myself up for a lot of challenges, but I am confident that she will be able to place me in positions that will help the school in the ways it needs it most. I definitely still want to teach kids, that's where my biggest passion is, but Pastora sees me in a leadership role in the school that would have me working with the teachers and essentially being a supervisor. She wants me to use my experience (which feels odd to me since I don't feel like I have much experience) to be able to help the other teachers. I definitely feel like there are a lot of things I can do with that, but well see what happens. We still don't have an official principal so one idea is to have several co-leaders that work together in certain aspects of the principals role. Pastora would be the overseer, we have a supervisor for nursery and kinder, a supervisor for grade 1-6 math, Filipino, and history, and me a supervisor for grade1-6 English, science, and MAPEH. I am definitely in a position of just giving it up to God. I've done a lot of things in life that I didn't know if I could do and I could easily look at this situation and worry about not being qualified, or experienced, or good enough, or I could just trust that whatever I end up doing God is putting me in the situation that He wants me in. As we go through this next week and get more things figured out hopefully my job will be figured out and I'll know exactly what I'm doing but until then I'll just keep working on what I need to be doing and trust God's plans.
Earlier I was explaining some of the challenges that we have had here and I wasn't doing it to complain or to leave it at that. The thing about challenges is that when you beat them you are stronger than when you started. It would have been easy to give up when so many challenges came at me but I didn't and the missionaries that are still here didn't either. We all went through the challenges together and when we came out we realized we were so much stronger together. We realized we were a team and we were a team that God has here together for a reason. We have learned to trust God in the situations that we don't understand, because He is so much bigger than any challenge we will face. We struggled last year because we tried to do things on our own. We tried to walk through challenges and get through it on our own abilities. We thought we just needed to work a little harder, or do a little more, or pray a little harder when the truth was we just needed to surrender. We needed to surrender our pride to each other and surrender our trust to God. As a missionary it feels like you are supposed to be so strong and you aren't supposed to be suffering or having a hard time in your faith, you aren't supposed to be lacking the ability or motivation to keep going. You feel like you must be a terrible missionary if you're going through any of that and you put up a mask that says you're strong and doing great because of course your relationship with God is great because you're an awesome christian. Well what we slowly realized was that we all had the same mask on. We were all going through the same struggles and none of us were willing to lay down our pride and say that we were having trouble or we needed help. We have found an incredible support group that is so close and constantly getting closer because we were finally willing to surrender to each other. We were finally able to be honest and open and take of the masks we were putting up. We are always in prayer together and are so excited for the ability to make an impact spiritually this year. We have so many ideas of what we want to do and are so excited to do it. Another missionary and I were talking about how much we wanted to have a Bible study and that we were both just kind of waiting for it to happen. Neither of us really had the confidence to start it up. So I said ok and starting next Saturday night I'll be leading a weekly Bible study for the other missionaries and hopefully the Filipino teachers also, and the other missionary is going to lead the worship during it. I was talking to the other male missionary here and we were talking about how we really wanted to have someone to just go to when we needed to pray and that we were really looking for prayer to take over our lives and instead of trying to fix everything with harder work to slow down and pray to God for our help. So we prayed about it. And we continue to pray about things whenever they come up. We've gone from being coworkers to brothers. There was a huge division between the volunteers and the Filipino staff last year, and none of us wanted it to be there, so we've talked about how to fix it. I've spent a lot of time trying to get to know our new teachers and we have so much we want to do this year to grow with them instead having a separation.
I was nervous talking about the struggles our ministry is going through, but I did it to show the positives that are coming out of it. Throughout all of it I am so motivated and stoked about what this year has to offer and I get to do it with a small group of missionaries who are equally as excited about the impact we are going to make in this school and on this island. We are going to be the missionaries that this ministry needs us to be and we are going to trust that God is putting us in the situations He wants us in to be able to make a difference here. We wanted to make a difference but we were waiting for God to put the opportunities in our lap. So many times I think people are hesitant in doing things. We want to do things but we don't know how or what or what's going to happen when we do. Don't wait. Opportunities are out there. Pray about it, surrender to God and trust that He will lead you where you need to go and give you the ability to do what you need to do, and then step out and do it.

Some other things I've been doing. I made a trip to Carabao Island a couple weeks ago to work at a feeding on the island. One of our staff workers who helps with construction, maintenance, and other things within the ministry lives on Carabao and has a feeding every week for the Ati village there. He's been trying to get missionaries to go over there to see his feeding so I decided to go do it. It's only a 40 minute boat ride over to the island but the boat only goes back and forth one time every morning, so it's a 24 hour round trip. It was a beautiful boat ride over to the island and I got to sit on top of the boat, possibly because I'm white, so it was really cool. Half way through we were joined by a pod of dolphins. They were swimming right a long side of us for about 5 minutes.Of course I wasn't able to get a picture when they were out of the water, and my battery died when I tried to take a video.

If you look really closely to the left of the tips of bamboo you can see 2 dolphins under water.

There were like 6 dolphins jumping along side the boat and of course when my picture took they were all under water. You can kind of see their splashes though, so that's almost cool.

Cliffs and caves on Carabao

Jerry's son Jacob and his friend

Jerry's family and neighbor kids who wanted to be in the picture

Boracay in the distance.

And Panay in the super distance.

Super mischievous monkey, good thing it was tied up.

The feeding was so much fun and a very interesting experience. Carabao isn't a tourist island at all because there isn't much access to it and there isn't any attention to it yet even though it's really just as beautiful as Boracay. So the island in whole doesn't see many tourists at all. The Ati village is a 20 minute motorcycle ride in the middle of the jungle, on top of the mountain, with no other access than offroading motorcycles. So Jerry told me when we got there that probably none of these kids have seen a white person in real life before. That kind of blew me away and judging by their reactions I believe it. I don't even know how to explain how weird of a feeling that is and just how unbelievable it is. When the kids first saw me they were definitely in a combination of fear and awe. They were very unsure about me but also very curious. I was over where we were cooking the food and the kids were a little ways away just kind of watching, then all of a sudden they took off out of sight somewhere. A couple minutes later I see the kids sneaking up in the bushes behind where we were trying to get as close as possible without me seeing them, it was really funny. They slowly started getting braver and braver. One of the guys went up into the tree to get some coconuts and got some down for us. He opened one up and gave it to me and all the kids came in really close and were in suspense to see what I was going to do. I drank it and all of a sudden it was like they realized I was human or something. They all were laughing and came right up to me and we were like best friends.

We led the kids in some songs and they were all into it, which was so awesome to see because sometimes, especially with the older kids, they think  they're too cool to sing, but they were into it here.

I gave them a Bible story, which was obviously translated, and they were all into it and listened and participated and it was just really cool to see how hungry they were to learn.

I taught them how to play duck duck goose, and it was definitely an interesting experience, but a ton of fun. it was more along the lines of duck duck run, but they got the basic idea.

The little kids played, the older kids played, even some of the moms played. It was such a fun time.

Jerry said there were 4 families at the feeding this day and there are 9 families in the village and they are usually all at the feeding.

I loved this feeding and hanging out with these kids. I am currently looking for an affordable and easier way to get back and forth from the island. I would love to come to this feeding more but it is hard when school starts to be able to do it. I have to leave Sunday morning at 6, miss church, stay the night there, leave at 5 in the morning on Monday and then go to school. Hopefully I will be able to find a way to do it. Jerry has been able to provide them with the food once a week, and clothes that we have donated to us. But I'd love to be able to help with some medical needs and also continue to bring the Gospel and fun times.

The beaches are really pretty identical to Boracay. I wouldn't be surprised if this island is a huge tourist attraction in 5 years.

Jerry and his sons. Because he works on Boracay he gets two days with his sons every week. This is very common in the Philippines and is a sad thing to see. A lot of my kids from school had fathers that worked on other islands or even in other countries to be able to support their families. It's such a hard situation because to be able to provide your family with food and a house and everything they need to live, it means being away from them. When he is home his kids don't want to let him out of their sight, and they are definitely very close in the time they have together.

Some random fruits we picked off of trees to eat.

I was also able to spend a week visiting a coteacher in her hometown of Lucban in another part of the Philippines. She invited all the foreigner teachers to come visit her during the festival her town has every year. I went with one of the other missionaries to go check it out. It was a fun time seeing anther part of the country and the different things they had.

 This was at a catholic church just outside of town. They had a ton of statues everywhere. There are stairs that zig-zag up this hill and it basically has Jesus' life displayed as you walk through it up to the top.

 Who knew the garden of Eden was actually in the Philippines.

 So that's a hotel. Yeah, pretty awesome. Why we didn't stay there I don't know. I imagine it was pretty expensive, but how many people can say they've spent the night in Noah's ark?

 Don't worry its fake.

 Jesus. Normally I would have climbed up and given him a hug, but I'm pretty sure I might have been kicked out.

A waterfall we went to. It was the coldest water I have ever felt in the Philippines. It literally felt like melted snow, obviously it wasn't but I'm not sure where the water came from or how it got so cold.

 Super creepy guy in the parade, everyone wanted me to take a picture with it, I wasn't so thrilled.

So Lucban has the Pahiyas Festival every year, and basically it's a Catholic celebration where they pay tribute to the saint of the harvest San Isidro. Their tribute to him is to decorate their houses with food from the harvest. As it got commercialized it's probably more so for the prize money now than for the tribute to a saint. It's a huge festival with a ton of houses to see. It takes about 2 hours to walk through the entire thing to see all the houses. There are definitely some very creative and colorful houses, and it was really awesome to see everything.

One of the other things I have been doing has been trying to plan the trip for our group coming to Boracay in July. I am so excited for them to come and for everything they are going to be able to do here. I want to thank everyone for the support that has been given to them through the fundraisers and raising the funds to be able to get here. Thank you so for all the contributions.