Visiting

For the past few weeks we've been spending half a day in a poor community with a couple classmates for our community organizing class. It's been an amazing learning experience. It would be hard to describe to you what we experience there; it's something that must be experienced to be understood. We're so grateful for our time here in school where we get to learn about different ways to work with the poor and get to know people in some very poor communities.

The pictures below were taken in a community that's been built above a canal. We've spent hours here drinking soda and talking with the locals. Quite eye opening.

Where are we??

China??

Nope, we're still in Manila. These pictures were taken in Chinatown. We love Chinatown here and in San Francisco. It's fun to "travel" and experience China without leaving the country. I love this picture of McDonald's with the Filipino flag. Uche's quite the photographer. We ate some great food the day we hung out there. There are no pictures of the food cause we were too busy eating!!

What we've been up to...

If you were to ask me how we're doing here in the Philippines I would tell you we're good, but so busy. Our school load is quite heavy this semester and we're enjoying every minute of it. There's so much to learn! We've also been kept busy with different things outside of the classroom. I'll try to show a few pictures of things we've been up to.

One of our Korean classmates had a team from his home church visiting, so he invited me and Uche to come do a short lesson on English pronunciation. As a thank you they sent us home with t-shirts and kimchi!

For our intro to community development class we had a retreat at our professor's house. She lives outside of the metro area where life is cooler, calmer and less polluted than our place. We were able to enjoy good discussions about the role of the church in the world and relax in that restful place.

One of the things we enjoy here is different kinds of fruit. We miss things like peaches and nectarines which are not to be found here. But we get to enjoy things like mangos, sweet pineapple, and pomelos. You can see what pomelos are like in the picture above. They are bigger than grapefruits and sweeter. When we purchased our pomelo we asked the lady to cut off the skin which took a good inch off the diameter. Later that evening we enjoyed this sweet fruit in one sitting.

Mostly we've been studying. We have been reading and writing and reading some more. We've been spending lots of time in the library which is air conditioned. We especially like these seats as they are just a few feet away from the air conditioner! So, if you ever want to know what we're doing, it's probably a pretty accurate guess that we're sitting in those two chairs with a book and/or computer in front of us.