Giving

We've been up to a lot lately. I love it. Most of you know that one of the biggest reasons I came here was because of all of the things they told me I was going to be doing. They said I was always going to be busy and have a lot of different jobs and responsibilities here, and they were right. I have taken up so many different things and the more that I take on the more opportunities come my way to do even more. And I love it. I'm no longer a newcomer here, I have been here for long enough and have the experience that people know what I have done and are giving me more responsibilities to have even more important roles here. I am starting to experience some of the benefits of a longer term mission trip. I am so glad that I committed to 2 years because there is no way I'd be able to leave in a couple months. I am so excited about so many things for this summer and next year that it is hard to stay focused on this year at times. I am so blessed with all of the opportunities I have been given and so glad to see that I am being given even more.
This weekend we worked on another shelter that needed the entire roof replaced, and a few other things repaired. We had to take down all the nipa from the roof, which was actually a lot more work than I thought it would be. Then we replaced some of the bamboo that was rotted out up on the roof with new bamboo. Then we obviously had to put up the new roof on the shelter. That was the hardest and most time consuming part. Luckily we got some help from some Filipino men from the community and they were a lot better and faster than us. We also made a couple of benches for the shelter for the kids to sit on. I was working on one of the benches and a little boy came over and started to help me. He wanted to hammer so I let him hammer. He stayed with me and we did the entire bench together. He was a trooper. I definitely was scared for my thumb several times but he never managed to hit it so that was a success.

 Starting to take the old roof off.

 Finishing taking the old roof off.

 Starting to put the new roof on

 Building a bench with the help of this little guy.

Today I took my fifth graders on a field trip through the community picking up garbage. We had a unit in science about conservation and we learned about pollution and the effects it has on the environment. We also talked about ways we can help prevent or help fix problems of pollution and the importance of standing up against pollution. We brainstormed ideas of what we could do to help our environment and they came up with the idea of a beach clean up. I thought it was a great idea and was excited for it, except that we ran into a problem. The Philippine Gov't won't let anyone clean the beach because there are people who are paid to clean the beaches. Clearly they don't do that great of a job, but apparently they exist. So they won't let anyone clean the beaches because it would be taking away from someone's job. I'm not sure how much sense that makes since their entire economy is based off of people coming to see the beaches, you wouldn't think they would turn down people volunteering to help pick up all the trash. But there wasn't anything we could do about it so we decided to do a clean up within the community around the school. The cool part of it is that the community behind the school is almost entirely Muslim, so a lot of the area we cleaned up was the Muslim neighborhood. People were very surprised to see kids going around picking up garbage and it was just really neat to go around in our Agape uniforms and having people see us and what we are all about. The best part about it was seeing my kids going through the neighborhoods with a motivation to do there best and pick up as much trash as possible. It would have been easy for them to complain and not want to do it or be lazy about it, but they weren't. It was like a challenge to them to pick up as much as they could and that was so awesome to see. To see them walking around picking up trash with smiles on their faces was incredible. We even had to go back 20 minutes earlier than scheduled because we had filled up all of our trash bags so quickly.
 Here are some pictures of my kids from my feeding site at Cagban.

 She was trying to imitate me, she put on my backpack too and actually did a pretty good job.

They gave me flowers for Valentine's Day, probably off of somebody's plant, but flowers none the less.

My second graders also got in on the Valentine's Day gifts. They all made cards for me, and I also made cards for them. One of my 2nd graders even got me cologne which I thought was really funny.

One of most awesome opportunities I have had lately is being able to help out an Ati family on the island. The Ati are the original people of the island have been pretty much removed except for a few basically reservations on the island. The Ati don't have many rights, if any at all, so they are in very extreme poverty. A lot of the Ati on Boracay are homeless because they simply are given any opportunities for anything else. I have about a fifteen minute walk to my feeding site at Cagban because it's pretty far out into the jungle and so I walk through a lot of different areas on back roads and paths and things to get there. Along one of the roads 3 weeks ago there was an Ati family camping out under a tarp and living in that spot. There was an older couple (grandparents), a younger couple (parents) and four kids. On the way back from the feeding I decided to stop because I had everything with me from the feeding that I could give to them. I had vitamins for the kids, first aid, and the Bible lesson coloring sheets and some crayons. I gave them everything and they spoke about as much English as I spoke Tagalog so we weren't able to talk much but just were able to communicate our love and caring for each other. The next week I stopped by the family again and gave them everything on the way to the feeding. They were very thankful and we were even able to communicate a little better through our limited bilingualness. After the feeding I was walking back by them and they were cooking their dinner which didn't look like much more than rice and a little bit of some other things. We said hi and then they asked me to come join them for dinner. I was absolutely blown away. This family had nothing, they were homeless with nothing but a tarp and some pots and pans in their possession, with probably not enough food to fully go around, and yet they were willing to share what they had with me. Even more than that was the genuineness of it. It wasn't just a half-hearted offer or just a nice thing to do kind of offering, they were genuinely appreciative of what I had done for them and the relationship we had after just those 2 weeks was as if we had known each other for a year. It was amazing. Because of health reasons and because I didn't want to take the little amount of food they had, I didn't stay to eat. I was really excited to see them the next week though and offer to bring them a meal, and sit down and eat it with them. Unfortunately as I was going to my feeding this week the family was no longer there, they had packed up and gone somewhere else. It was sad that I wasn't able to see them again,  but my hope is that they are somewhere better and safer. I don't think I will ever forget that family though and their incredible act of kindness and selflessness. I was feeling good about what I was doing and what I was giving them, and they turned around and gave me a lesson on giving. We have so much and give so little, they have so little and were willing to give so much.
Kids say funny things, especially when they are learning English and say whatever random thing comes up to them. My second graders always come up to me and practice there English phrases that they know. They just like to be able to talk and feel successful in having an English conversation, which is awesome, but sometimes they say some pretty funny things. The other day one of my kids comes up to me as I walked in the door and says "Mr. Schmidt, you are not young". I don't know if you've ever been called not young, but it is actually a lot worse than being called old. If he would have called me old I would have been able to tell myself his English vocabulary is off, because I'm not actually old. But when he called me not young all I could do is say wow, that's actually very accurate.
Not everything they say is so bad though. I forgot to add this story to my last blog, so I'll share it now. A lot of the kids here are very fascinated with facial hair because its something Filipinos just don't typically have. So a lot of times they like to feel my beard and are very interested in it. One of the girls at my feeding site reached up to my beard and said "you're like Jesus". My response was "well sort of", but my response in my head was "I know, right?". Definitely one of the best compliments I've gotten, it may have been technically for a different reason then I had hoped, but still I'll take what I can get.
Thank you again for all of your support and prayer. Please continue to pray for our school and ministry as we go through a lot of changes for next year. Please also continue to pray for me as I am super busy with so many different things going on. I have been healthy for almost three weeks now, which is probably close to a record so please continue to pray for my health so I can continue to be at 100% to be able to do everything I do here. Mahal ko kayo. (I love you all).

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.

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.