Jenn's Journalings

Flooded Streets

We’ve had two pretty heavy rains this past week…and actually it seems another one is starting as I write this.

The ceiling in my bedroom has been leaking a little during the extra heavy rain. It’s nothing serious yet, but we’ve alerted the landlord. Hopefully that will be able to be fixed soon.

I am thankful that my street doesn’t flood much when it rains. The other streets in my subdivision flood pretty badly. I have several friends who’ve been cleaning up after the floods that get into their homes. This can be very frustrating and time consuming for them, especially when it happens regularly. I know they would appreciate your prayers.

Below I’ve included two pictures of my street from this past week. This was after the second heavy rain. Just before I took the pictures someone was walking through the flood waters, and all of a sudden he started walking more quickly. I wondered why. I found out why pretty quickly – a vehicle was coming. Vehicles splash and also make the water slosh around more, so the man was trying to get out of the way.

FIA Staff Retreat

We just returned from a few days away at Eden Nature Park and Resort for our FIA staff retreat. Eden is one of my favorite places to go here in Davao, for two reasons: 1) it’s beautiful, and 2) it’s cooler since it’s up on a mountain.

We had a Sunday morning devotional time at the amphitheater, and I enjoyed the opportunity to worship the Lord in His creation.

Thank you for praying for us as we start the school year this Wednesday, August 2.

Lizards

Seeing little lizards around the house is normal here in the Philippines.
(I’m not sure if they’re actually lizards or geckos or …, but I usually call them lizards.)

They scurry around on the wall, sometimes they fall out of the cupboard or climb out of a drawer when you open it, and sometimes they’re in your trash can. I remember back when I’d only been here for a couple months. I went down to the kitchen in the dark…and the trash can made noise. Our trash can is near a back window. I quickly figured out that it was just a little lizard in the trash.

Here’s a larger one that’s been hanging around our kitchen lately. (He’s probably 3/4 the length of my hand.) I caught him in the trash can the other night.

That same night I went up to my room and there was a little, tiny one on the floor. I took some pictures of it near my backpack as well. In this first picture you can hopefully see just how small he is. He’s to the right of the backpack strap.

I do think these little guys are cute…unless they fall on me. 🙂

I have some interesting lizard stories from school – one about my projector screen and one about my air con (air conditioning unit). Ask me about these when I’m home on furlough. 🙂

OE- Wednesday

Wednesday was reef day. We took bancas from the base camp to the reef. (Here’s a picture of a banca, although it’s from Google and not a picture of one we actually were on.)

My squad had a banca just for us (and our stuff and the water to took to the reef site). Our banca had some motor problems, so although we were one of the first to leave we were one of the last to arrive. We had fun singing on the way there. We sang quite a few songs; the following list tells some of them: God’s Not Dead, How He Loves Us, I Will Follow, Our God, Who’s the King of the Jungle?, Let It Go, Do You Want to Build a Snowman?, and some of the Tagalog songs we sang the day before too. (I included links, so if you want to hear some of these songs on Youtube just click on the title.)

Here’s my girls on the banca on the way over.

When we arrived we had a bit of scuba diving orientation, site orientation, and an entertaining demo for putting on sun screen.

The squads were split into 4 groups to rotate through the activities. We started with squad time, so we had a merienda (snack) of watermelon and had squad devotions. A few of my girls went on a short hike with another squad. Here’s a few of the pictures they took.

The next activity was either scuba diving or a craft. 3 of my girls went diving and the rest of us painted a rock. It was fun.

Next we went snorkeling. The water was a bit cold, but then it was fun. We didn’t get many pictures since we were swimming.

: First the kids had to practice snorkeling in the pool.

: Some of them got cold quickly and went to the sun to warm up.

Our last activity was the squid dissection. It was pretty cool!

We had free time, dinner, a speaker, and then squad time. We had great squad devotions this evening.

: I was so glad my girls all got along.

: Here’s my 8th graders on their last OE.

We sang on our banca ride back to base camp the next morning too. We didn’t sing as much, but we sang lots of praise songs. The banca driver talked to me afterward. He was encouraged by our songs and said he was Brother ____. It was neat that we were able to minister to our banca driver on our way between sites.

OE – Tuesday

On Tuesday my traveling group stayed at base camp. In the morning we built sand castles.

Then we had ministry time at a local Filipino elementary school. We took lunch to the students and played games with them. My squad had 3rd grade; there were 78 kids in one room. It was really full! After everyone had food we gathered together for a Vacation Bible School type lesson. We sang songs with the kids – in Tagalog and English. There was a Bible lesson on Joseph, and our kids helped act out portions of the story. The last couple pictures are a few of my girls eating lunch on the way back to base camp.

The special event at base camp was the chicken kill. We had to kill our chickens for dinner. It was actually kinda cool. (Please note: These pictures might not be appropriate for small children or squeamish people.)

: First you swing the chicken around in a wind mill motion.

: This disorients the chicken.

: My girls named our chickens Freddy and Alice.

: We were then known as the squad who named their chickens. Thankfully this didn’t result in any psychological problems when it came time to eat them for dinner.

: There were 2 kill options. One was to place the chicken on the sand with a bar over its neck. You yank on the feet and its head comes off.

: Be sure to have the bucket ready so the chicken doesn’t drip blood everywhere.

: The second option was to put it in this funnel-shaped container and slit its throat. I personally considered this less humane since the kids struggled to actually cut the jugular.

: Then the adults held the chickens in boiling water to loosen the feathers.

: Next it was plucking time.

: Chickens have a lot more feathers than I realized. There’s lots of little tiny ones, and they’re important to get off since we didn’t want to eat them.

: Before the gutting someone came to cut the feet off.

: I was proud of my girls who were willing to pull the guts out.

: After we cleaned them out and got them approved our chickens went to the kitchen to be boiled.

Then we had free time for a couple hours before preparing the rest of our dinner. The kitchen crew boiled our chickens and then my squad chose to use the rotisserie to BBQ them. We also cut up potatoes and carrots and cooked them in foil in the fire. Our dessert was muffins poured into orange peels, wrapped in foil, and baked in the fire. They were amazing!!

: We started at the table with all of our supplies.

: A few girls took the vegetables and chickens to the fire.

: The boys were cooking one of their chickens this way too.

: They turned out great!

: Here are the orange peels ready for batter.

: Now they’re done (and super hot), so it was time to get them out of the coals.

: And finally there was a table decorating contest.

: We didn’t win the contest…

: …but our food tasted great!

OE – Monday

OE this year was Victory on the Volcano. We flew out of Davao VERY early in the morning; I think we met at the airport around 3:45 or 4 am.

Here’s our group~4 adults & 42 students.

We had a 3-4 hour bus ride to base camp after arriving in Manila.

Here’s some of the traffic.

There’s always something interesting to see out the window ~ like unique water towers.

We arrived at the base camp early, but that turned out ok. I was thankful for some down-time after the travel. Our kids did great…despite the many “are we there yet?” questions. 🙂

Base camp had a dorm, swimming pool, kitchen, chapel, basketball court, and was on the beach. My kids took some beautiful shots at the beach.

The first day of OE consists of travel and some orientation. Each group does their squad intro and we have a speaker in the evening. You may have seen clips of the squad intros if you watched the videos in my previous post.

Fun @ Croc Park

Back in May I went to Crocodile Park with some friends. The park has mostly crocodiles but also other animals that they have rescued (or taken in as rescues). Enjoy!

I think this bird was struggling to determine whether he was a bird or a bat. 🙂

This baby tiger was so cute!

The poor little guy had fallen and wasn’t able to get out.

This one wasn’t so cute…

This guy has a broken jaw (I think). Looks pretty strange.

Deer in the Philippines look different. This is the first one I remember seeing with antlers too!

This peacock was beautiful!

This is the large & old crocodile at the park.

They do a show with “dancing crocodiles” when they feed them and they come up out of the water to get the meat.

Summer Fun!! – Part 6

We went to Paradise Island on Saturday. The morning was rainy but it stopped before we got to the island. It made for a cooler day, which was nice.

We swam around, went snorkeling, and had lunch.

For lunch we had carbonara (with garlic bread) and zucchini with tomato sauce. Then we ordered halo halo also. Halo halo means mix mix. The contents vary and could include the following: shaved ice, evaporated milk, corn flakes, ube ice cream, red beans, banana, coconut strips, pinipig (ground dried rice – sort of like rice krispies), tapioca, gelatin, sweet corn, etc. (You can look it up online.)

It was a relaxing and fun time! I’m so glad Becky was able to visit for a few days.

(btw- it was not my last day of summer)

Summer Fun!! – Part 5

After we checked out we got lunch at the fishing village. The entrance was included in our package.

This was standing just outside of the village entrance. We had taken pictures here the day before.

We each caught a tilapia (0.7 kilos total) and then had them grilled. We bought two servings of rice as well. I’m not a huge fish person, but it was good. I even ate it with my hands – Filipino style. 🙂