Thanksgiving Philippines Trip

It's been over a month since Thanksgiving, and we feel terrible about not sharing this with you sooner, but better late than never. It's been a busy season since that time, but we know that's not a good excuse. It's thanks to faithful supporters like you that we were able to go and participate in God's work in the Philippines over our holiday break. Thank you especially to Transfer Community Church of God and Greenville Church of God - you were instrumental!

The best way for us to do this is not with a ton of words, so we'll share pictures and comment. Then if the pictures don't say the thousand words they should, we'll elaborate. Keep reading!

Our main mission while we were there was to witness and provide relief to a group of families whose villages were still under water from typhoons that hit a month earlier. This is a picture of the evacuation center that housed the 168 families. It was cramped, smelly, and hot- not ideal conditions for living.

Despite the conditions (and we find this generally true of Filipinos) the people in the evacuation center almost always had a smile on their faces. We were able to spend some very quality time with them and made bonds with more than a few.

Part of losing your home means changing the way you do things. One of the things that changes is where you bath. For these people, it was right out in the open by the street. The adults washed with their clothes on.

Since the typhoons hit, Kids International Ministries, or KIM, has been providing food for evacuation centers like this. Because there is so much need, KIM has only been able to provide one meal a week to each center. However, when we came, we were able to focus on this evac center and provide two meals a day for the 4 full days in country. This is one of the "feedings" in process.

Feeding over 500 people puts a large demand on food supplies, so we were only able to feed the children. They lined up with their bowls ready, and their stomachs grumbling...
...and went away satisfied.

This is one of the villages that the people in the evacuation center came from. The water is black and sludgy because it had been sitting without flow for over a month. Mosquitoes multiply quickly and carry a deadly disease called dengue fever. This water is about knee-deep in the center of town, but you can see the water lines from where the water first settled- at about waist high. The village was littered with refuse.

Due to generous support from friends in the States and Korea, we were able to purchase 200 Tagalog (Filipino language) Bibles to give to the families in the evac center. This is now their only bible. We also collected clothing, vitamins, soap, and other goodies for the people. Those were later given away at Christmastime.
We spent some time putting a short, personalized message in each bible. Also included was a tract that listed key verses pertaining to salvation and a relationship with Jesus.

"From your Korean brothers and sisters in Christ"

Every evening, we gathered the willing adults on one side of the evac center, and the children on the other side and preached the gospel to them. Eric, shown here, preached to the adults. On the third night, we passed out the bibles (didn't have them till then) and we helped them find the verses he preached on. On the other side, Jess and our high school students sang songs, put on skits, and gave lessons to children about what it means to know and trust in Jesus.

Another cool thing we got to do was lead a chapel at the Christian school that the KIM Children's Home kids go to. Most of us were involved in some way. Here is Jess, Laurie, Eric, and some of our high schoolers leading a game of Hangman to guess the memory verse.
Here's Matt and Russ (and two of the kids from the children's home) being giants from the story of the twelve spies in Canaan.
Every night at the Children's home, the kids have devotions. Our group led devotions twice, Russ led one of those nights- singing songs and teaching about Thanksgiving.

Apologies and Bellies

For those of you out there that follow this blog religiously (mom), we're sorry. We have been grabbing at excuses for a reason for not posting anything for this long. We've pulled our hands back with nothing in them- we have no good excuses. We've just been lazy, and so we have to apologize. As part of the same body of Christ, we are responsible for sharing what is happening in the field, what is happening only by the funds you have blessed us with, which have been given to you by God for this purpose. We'll get better.. but for now, some much needed blog bingeing.

Here's a fun little up-to-date photo of Jess in all her pregnant glory from week 22. Ain't she purdy?!

The pregnancy is going very well. We found out that near the date of May 9, 2010 we're going to be the proud parents of a baby GIRL. It's nice to put a gender to our baby so we can say, "She's going to be smart like daddy," or "She's gonna be beautiful like mommy." (Obviously Russ is writing this post!) We also have a name picked out that we're 99% sure we're going to use, but we'll keep it out of publication until it's for sure.

We have another ultrasound scheduled for next Wednesday, and it's a level 2 scan, checking the whole body. We'll post it next week!