We just had a family from Taiwan come a few days ago to work in the school a little bit and help with some things in the organization.
We also had one of the missionaries that was here last year come back this week. He was here last year but went back home to raise some more support for this year. He is working in the school but he also does a lot of work with high schoolers on the island in a program called younglife. It has been great having another guy on the team and we may be living together soon if we can find a place that works so that we can save some money.
This week I also got to go to my first Filipino birthday party. It was pretty interesting I guess would be a good word for it. One of my 2nd graders had a birthday and the class as well as her teachers were invited to the party after school. So I went with the class over there after school. The first thing I noticed when I got there was that we weren't going to be able to all fit in the small room that they had for the party. There were about 25 kids there and 10-15 adults. There was no way we were all going to fit. Well somehow we did. Not very comfortably, but we fit. The second thing I noticed was the pig sitting on the table. I'm used to it as it's very common to see a whole pig just ready to be eaten right off the body at a lot of places. Still a little weird though. The third thing I noticed was the extremely creepy clown they had to provide the entertainment. He had like three teeth, he had a smile painted on his face but never actually smiled, and his outfit was dirty and weird and just made him all together look really creepy. After everyone got in and settled into the party I was asked to pray. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to pray for exactly, if I was praying for the party, or Heshen, or for the food, so I just kinda prayed for everything. I was obviously a little nervous at first because I didn't know most of the people there and I wasn't sure what I was doing exactly, but it was really neat to be asked and that they saw me as someone who could pray for the party and that prayer was even important enough to include so that was awesome.
After my prayer the clown took over and did some games with the kids which were kind of weird. They played some games for a while and then we started the food. The food consisted of the pig on the table which you just kind of stuck your fork in and took what you wanted, fried pig fat on a stick (which is a favorite here), a hot dog and 2 marshmallows on a stick (which I thought was kind of a random combination), other foods that I'm not totally sure what they were, and a chocolate cake (which was apparently just for looks because we didn't actually eat it, it just sat there on the table). Being a special guest of course everyone wants to pile food on my plate even though I didn't really want any of it. Part of being a missionary is learning how to eat gross foods without gagging and learning how to sneak food onto other peoples' plates without them noticing, unfortunately I'm a lot better at the latter.
After we ate the clown took over again and started his "magic" tricks, which were absolutely terrible I thought. His first trick was to put a piece of tape on the bottom of a 2 liter bottle full of water so that when he took his fingers off it wouldn't pour off. Well he lost a quarter of the water trying to do it and it took about 5 minutes before he actually got it to work, not the best way to start a magic show. is second trick went much worse actually. He had a cup of yellow liquid and a cup of clear liquid. He said that he was going to put the clear liquid into the yellow liquid and it would change color. So I figured there would be a chemical reaction of the two liquids and it would turn dark or something, well he poured the cups together and after a minute of waiting for it to change color and it not changing color, he said "look, now it's light yellow!" Yeah, the kids didn't buy it either. His third trick involved a cup and a spoon. He had the spoon in the middle of the cup and claimed he could hold the cup up with just the spoon. It was impressive for a second, until you saw his back two fingers holding the back of cup. One of the kids noticed to and stood up to point it out to everyone and the clown shooed him away. His next trick he called a volunteer, I did a good job of ducking and he called my partner teacher Hya up. I was so glad it wasn't me because I was seriously creeped out by the guy, I did feel a little bad for Hya though. His next trick he pulled up another woman to be a volunteer. He had a bag that he showed everyone was empty. He had the woman turn around and stuck the bag up to her back he then pulled a bra out of the bag. I was first off shocked because really? This is a 7 year old's birthday party and you're doing that as a trick, but I was also shocked because I legitimately wasn't sure how he did it. I was actually impressed. All the kids laughed and all of the teachers had the same kind of shocked look on their face.
After the magic show they brought out what I call the Filipino pinata. Its really nothing like a pinata but it's a square medal grid that has a bunch of bags full of candy hanging from it. You hold it up over the kids and its a wild and crazy free for all as the kids grab the bags of candy. Surprisingly, blindfolding a kid, giving them a big stick, spinning them around until they're dizzy and telling them to swing wildly as hard as they can is way safer than what they do here. It was such a crazy experience to see a birthday party here and see how things are celebrated and what people do. I was so glad I got to go and see it and experience it with everyone.
Here are some pictures of some of my kids at the party.
This week I also got to experience Teacher Day. I usually get bombarded with a huge group hug as soon as I walk into my class in the morning, but last Wednesday I got bombarded and they were saying happy teacher day Mr. Schmidt. I wasn't sure what they were talking about because I had never heard of a Teacher Day before, but apparently in the Philippines there is a day that is for teachers. Each one of them had made a card for me that drew pictures on and wrote things like "thank you for teaching us" and "we love you". It was really awesome. I think there needs to be a couple of these teacher days instead of just once a year, but one is a start. It was a really cool experience and it was awesome to go through all of the cards that they made me. I'm definitely keeping those. Here are some of the cards that they made for me.
A song that was sung in church on Sunday really hit me and later that afternoon I decided to draw a picture about it. The lyrics say my life is in You Lord, my strength is in You Lord, my Hope is in You Lord, in You, it's in You. I think one of the reasons it really hit me was that there seems to be a lot going on back home that I'm missing. Things are happening but I'm over here doing something totally different. I went all in for this opportunity and I don't regret it at all, but I'm depending on God for everything. my life is in His hands over here, I gave up a lot of my own desires and trusted that He would lead me to what's best. My strength is in Him. There are things that I am good at that are easy for me to do here, there are also things that are very difficult and I know I wouldn't be able to handle it all if it wasn't for God being my strength through everything that I deal with here. My hope is in Him. I put my trust entirely in God that this was where he wanted me to be and I went knowing that my hope in all situations was completely dependent on Him. My everything is in Him and I'm all in here on the island of Boracay to do whatever it is he wants me to do. That's what this picture represented to me.
Here are some pictures of my 2nd graders. My partner teacher Hya took these pictures and I got them off of her facebook.
These kids are wild and crazy and completely full of energy and joy. I love them like crazy but they are definitely a handful. The other day they were totally crazy and so I had them get up and do jumping jacks and Hya joked to me to have them do 100, and they actually probably got pretty close.They were jumping around for about 5 minutes straight. And to end with a little bit of a funny story I was walking around as the kids were writing their answers in their workbooks, and I stopped at one of the girls desks and her answers were right but she was putting question marks at the end of them. So I told her "your answers are good, but what goes at the end of the sentence, a period right, because these aren't questions. Her response was " I don't really like those, I like question marks a lot better".
