Happy Birthday Uche!

Yesterday was Uche's birthday, but the festivities started Sundayt night. We invited some people from church over for some pizza and cake. We had a nice time visiting with everyone and we had two cakes. The one above was brought by our friend, and I made one that tasted good, but looked a little weird, so no pictures to protect the creator of the tasty but crazy looking cake.

Here's the whole group. Do I stand out or what??? I need to start tanning or something... I'm glowing! :) This group of people are dear friends who we will miss when we leave...

The next day we spent the morning in the library as papers don't write themselves. But I convinced Uche that he had to give me the afternoon and evening for a surprise outing. So after lunch we headed to Megamall about 1/2 hour taxi ride away. We took taxis to and from the mall because it was Uche's birthday, and we were celebrating, so no public transportation for us! We spent sometime walking around the mall and enjoying the fact that it was air conditioned and pretty empty as it was Monday afternoon. We looked for a couple things Uche has been wanting to buy, but didn't find exactly what he wanted. We spent about an hour at a coffee shop relaxing and talking. I ordered Uche's favorite green tea latte, and he was nice enough to share it with me.

Here I am tasting the green tea latte.... hmmmm... not my favorite, but the birthday boy enjoyed it!

Afterwards we went to watch Green Zone. Uche enjoys movies with car chases and explosions, and this movie had both! After the movie we walked over to a fancy hotel to eat dinner at their buffet. This was the main surprise of the day. I did a little research and found out that they're considered one of the best, if not the best, buffet in town, and Uche enjoys buffets, so perfect birthday dinner.

The buffet did not disappoint! They had all kinds of Asian food as well as continental favorites. They even had a cheese tray! Cheese is a luxury in the Philippines. The dessert section was incredible, and I wished I hadn't gone for seconds on the roast beef with all the choices! Uche enjoyed halo halo, his favorite Filipino dessert. The whole atmosphere was very luxurious and we felt super spoiled during our time there. After dinner we walked back to the mall to catch a taxi home. We were so stuffed! Uche couldn't stand up straight until we had walked a block... so we got our money's worth!! It was a nice day we spent together and it was really nice to spoil ourselves a little bit. I suppose I shouldn't have gotten to enjoy it as much as I did because it wasn't my birthday.... We don't have any pictures from the buffet we were too busy eating!!

Here he is the birthday boy! My handsome wonderful husband. His birthday is also the anniversary of the day Uche proposed to me. Seven years ago he asked will you and I said yes, of course! He's the best husband I could've imagined, and I'm so blessed to be able to spend my life with him! Wow! That's a lot of exclamation points in one paragraph, but that's how great my husband is! He's a million billion exclamation points! :)

Motivation

I've posted a couple times here about visiting a poor community and conducting interviews there. We're doing it as research for our thesis, which we'll write together in the next few months. As an aside, it's such a fun blessing to be able to do school and ministry together with my husband. So, I was talking to my parents a few days ago, and they both asked what exactly we are doing, and I thought it would be good to explain exactly what we're doing for this internship/research for the long dreaded :) thesis!

Because we're followers of Christ, we want to make sure that whatever we do we're acting as Christ did and would do if he were still on earth now. So, when we think about doing community development we can't separate our understanding of Christ's work from our theory that motivates our actions in the community. We'll continue to explain what we're doing, but thought we should start with just a small piece of our whole theological framework regarding work in the community.

Whatever views one has regarding poverty and the causes of it, we can't ignore the many verses in scripture regarding the poor (don't just take our word for it, look yourself!). We're taking a class on the Prophets right now and there's soooo much there about God's views on how we should treat the poor in this section of the Bible.. The people of God were punished by the Assyrians and Babylonians because (1) they had been unfaithful to their God and (2) how they were treating each other, especially the poor and oppressed among them. Here's just one passage in Isaiah 58 (Uche is doing a paper on a part of Isaiah 58)

Isaiah 58:6-10
"Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:

to loose the chains of injustice

and untie the cords of the yoke,

to set the oppressed free

and break every yoke?

Is it not to share your food with the hungry

and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter-

when you see the naked, to clothe him,

and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?

Then you light will break forth like the dawn,

and your healing will quickly appear;

then your righteousness will go before you,

and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.

Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;

you will cry for help, and he will say: Here I am

"If you do away with the yoke of oppression,

with the pointing finger and malicious talk,

and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry

and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,

then your light will rise in the darkness,

and your night will become like the noonday.

And because every post should have some pictures...

The river surrounding the community is going down as dry season continues. When we first visited we had to ride a boat across the river, now we're able to drive across. I wonder if it'll dry up completely. If you don't have a car (like pretty much everyone who lives there) you can walk across this walkway for 1 peso ($.02)

Sports Festival

Last Saturday was the Inter Seminary Sports Festival. Four different seminaries in town got together to play against each other. It was a pretty fun day, and we were exhausted and sore when we got home!

These kids are the children of students (maybe staff and faculty as well, not sure) of the Nazarene seminary and they sang a welcome song for all of us.

Here's some of our students underneath our tent. Our school color was that yellow you see there. I don't own anything yellow cause it looks bad on me, so I came in my white Tshirt.

So, I played volleyball. Apparently, I can play volleyball- didn't know that. I guess it's more accurate to say I can serve- scored 11 points in a row during one set! I'm not sure if I just hit the ball in this picture or if I'm getting ready to... if I'm getting ready to hit it I'm probably screaming in terror that it's coming towards me- I usually try to avoid the ball...

Here's our team. We did win one game. This is a great group of girls, so it was fun playing with them. I was roped into playing because they needed a sixth player. We decided that in order to motivate ourselves we'd pretend the ball was our assignments. So, that ball became an OT midterm, an exegetical paper and Hebrew in general! Just a little seminary humor for you!!

Uche played one game of soccer. Our school didn't have a soccer team, so he joined another. Most of the pictures I got were like this- of Uche running away. I would try to get a picture of him doing something but by the time the picture would be taken he I'd get this.

Ok, here's a good one.

So, I didn't think I'd be playing anything. I was planning on finding a tree and I brought some homework to work on... so no sunscreen. I totally didn't even think about it till the end of our last game, and I saw my arms were a little pink. If you look closely you can see the outline of white skin from my sunglasses on my face. My arms look worse in this picture than they were. No need to lecture- I KNOW I need to wear sunscreen.

When we're not doing homework...

Lately I've been trying to figure out what I could share on our blog. I don't know how many more pictures I can post of us sitting in front of our computers with books piled all around us in the library! That's where we spend a large amount of our day. The library is air conditioned, has wifi and lots of books, so it's a good place to hang out! Sometimes we get to have a little fun...


Awwww... Starbucks... It's my happy place....

But even time at Starbucks must not be wasted. Some light reading... The Law and its Fulfillment A Pauline Theology of the Law- actually it was pretty interesting and quite helpful for my paper on Romans 7. Uche was reading about Old Testament prophecy. Actually, we went to Starbucks during a recent trip to immigration- Starbucks is making a killing being located right across from a place that requires you to wait for anything and everything.

So, this outing was purely fun (though we did go grocery shopping afterwards). We went and saw Avatar. Fortunately, the mall closest to us has an IMAX 3D screen, so we got to really enjoy all the effects.

Had to add a picture of Uche with his glasses, just to be fair. He insisted on wearing them walking into the theater and walking out. Maybe I can find this style in pair of sunglasses for him.

In all seriousness, we have been super busy this month. Fun outings do not write papers! We have been spending time in a poor community for our internship. We've been meeting with people there, and that has added to our already loaded schedule, but we're enjoying it and learning a lot. It's been exciting to put into use the great stuff we've learned over the last year.

We were joking while taking this picture that it was going to look like a class picture, and it kind of does. These are just some of the people we'll be working with in the community. They're all community leaders in some way, and their input is invaluable. Without their help we couldn't hope to accomplish anything.

We interviewed this woman about community issues. She was very brave to speak in English with us. I really respect any person who can even function in another language, and she was great! She did a great job of explaining things to us.

We'll be working with a church planter in the community to see how the church plant can be involved in community development. We're hoping to be able to work with the community to come up with a plan for some sort of project that could be a blessing to the whole community. We also talked about this community before, click here if you want to read about it.

Christmas trip 2009 part 2- Malaysia and Singapore

We were so sad to leave Hua Hin and the beautiful beach, but we wanted to see as much as possible on our trip, so we headed out of town. We had hoped to make arrangements in Bangkok to take a train from Hua Hin to Penang, Malaysia. The train was sold out! So, we headed down to Hua Hin and hoped we could make arrangements from there. We went into a travel agent near our hotel right after we checked in and were able to make arrangements to take a bus. We were happy just to be able to get to Penang as we had a schedule of reservations ahead of us. We left Hua Hin at 9:30 at night and arrived in Penang the next day around 6 pm. It was a very very long trip. We first rode on a nice sleeper bus, but early the next morning we were transferred to mini bus (vans) for the rest of the trip.
Once in Penang we were able to meet up with a friend of mine from college who lives there with his family, and he was able to set us up to stay in a guest room in their office. It was located in a nice quiet neighborhood close to cheap, but tasty, restaurants. In fact, Penang is known for good cheap food. We found it to be true! We went to church the next morning and spent the afternoon at the Penang Botanical gardens and wandering around town a bit. We left early the next morning for Kuala Lumpur. Our camera battery was getting low after Thailand, so we didn't get as many pictures of the rest of our trip as we'd like, but we did get a few good shots.

At the entrance to the gardens there were a couple carts selling snack food. I got some watermelon and Uche got peanuts. The lady who sold it to him asked if it was for feeding to the monkeys. I told her that he doesn't share his peanuts! Uche is serious about peanuts. :)

In the end, Uche did share a few with the monkeys.

The gardens were really beautiful and we enjoyed the quietness and the lush greenness. Because we live in the middle of a huge city we appreciate any chance to spend time in nature. We hadn't seen that many trees in one place for a while.

Inside the city we saw this street market and went looking for something to eat. It was super busy, as you can see, and we finally decided to head to the market closer to where we were staying. For most of our meals on our trip we just found a local market like this to eat in. Usually they're cheap and the food is good. At one point we did have dinner at KFC- I couldn't bear anymore rice and noodles.

It seemed like all along the coast of Penang (at least the areas we saw) there were high rises like these. They must have fantastic views.

Early Monday morning we flew to Kuala Lumpur. The must see place there is the Petronas Towers. Not sure what the banner says above Uche, but that's one of the entrances to the towers.

See we did travel together. We always joke that most of our pictures look like we went by ourselves since we spend our time taking each other's pictures. Fortunately, we can usually find some friendly person to take one of us together.

There is a park on one side of the towers and they have a shallow lake with a bunch of water fountains. Right after we took this picture it started pouring and we had to run for cover. We shared a gazebo with a bunch of people until it was safe to go out.

We didn't really do much in KL. We were exhausted and low on money. We had had a stressful morning and after days of being on the move we both kind of pooped out. We had been excited to fly to KL from Penang because it was a cheap short flight and then we'd get to spend the whole day in KL before taking a sleeper train to Singapore. In Penang, my friend had made arrangements for a taxi to pick us up at 5:00 am to take us to the airport. At 4 that morning I was woken up by the doorbell; I woke Uche up so he could go see what was going on. The taxi driver said he was ready to take us to the airport. Uche told him it was only 4, but the taxi driver corrected him saying it was 5! Well, the clock we were using as our alarm had been set on Thailand time which is an hour behind, so we were an hour behind. AUGH! We rushed to get ready and prayed we'd make it to the airport on time. We did make it, obviously, but I think I used all my adrenaline getting ready, so I was not in the mood to wander around a new city. We spent a lot of time just sitting at different places watching people. At one point we sat in an entrance of a large mall with these fantastic Christmas decorations (sorry no pictures of it) watching people take their pictures next to the decorations. It was a little weird to see M*slims taking pictures with Christmas decorations with songs about baby Jesus in the background. It's a crazy world we live in! Anyhow, at the end of the day we were happy to get on the train and head down to Singapore.

Singapore is something else. When we were walking around I felt like I was in Manhattan- it was so clean and beautiful! I haven't seen that many new luxury cars in a long time!

We spent a lot of time walking on Orchard Rd. which was super decorated for Christmas. The street is lined with malls. We even did a little shopping ourselves buying me a pair of shoes.

At the end of our day as we were riding the bus back to our hotel I spotted a Borders! A Borders!! I LOVE bookstores and I miss Borders/Barnes & Noble stores so much while I'm overseas. I almost yelled, "STOP THE BUS", but I really needed a shower and I had to go to the hotel to do that.... but if it hadn't been 36+ hours since I had showered (while walking miles in the tropic heat) I totally would've given up the money set aside for eating for the rest of the trip to go relax in Borders with a cup of coffee for a few hours!

This is the visitor center in Singapore, on Orchard Rd. They have FREE foot and leg massage machines. It's right next to the FREE chilled water cooler with cone shaped cups. If I didn't already love Singapore- I would've at that moment! After our refreshing time in the visitor center we were ready to hit the road and check out some more sights.

This is a well known hotel, Raffles Hotel. I still need to google it to see why. :) We didn't go inside because of the afore mentioned lack of showers!

This was a cool side street in Singapore. The street looks old and quaint which is contrasted with the modern skyscrapers in the background.

We were sad we only had one day in Singapore. It seems the theme of this trip was too many cool things to see, so little time!

Christmas trip Part 1- Thailand

It's hard to be away from home for Christmas, so for the three Christmases I've spent away from home I've traveled. My poor husband, has spent many more Christmases away from home, but he handles it better than I do- he handles most of life better than me as well! :) This year we decided to travel around another part of Asia we'd never been. We found some good priced tickets going to Singapore, so we bought them and started planning. We found out it's pretty easy to travel through Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, so we decided to head straight to Bangkok from Singapore and then work our way back down to Singapore over the next week. Over the next couple days we'll put up pictures to show what we saw. It was a once in a lifetime trip, and we won't bore you with all the stories, but if you have an extra 4 hours on your hands, give us a call, and we'll give you the long story! :)



Sitting in the tuk tuk in Bangkok. We only got to ride it once, but it's a fun way to travel. We were all about public transportation on this trip!



Uche enjoying the river taxi. Another great way to get around Bangkok. Sometimes we weren't sure what stop to get off at, but we just figured we'd follow the other foreigners since they hopefully knew where to go. The strategy worked pretty well actually.


View from river taxi. Not a sight you see everyday... unless, of course, you live in Bangkok. We really enjoyed seeing sights from the river. You can see how big these river taxis are.

This was outside the Grand Palace- not bad for a self portrait. This was before we decided to pay the admission to go inside. We debated whether to spend the money since admission was over $10 a person, and we were budget traveling.

We were glad we paid to go inside or we couldn't have gotten a picture like this! We have a lot of pictures from inside, but we'll only post a few here. Everytime we turned a corner we'd see another amazing building.

We had to wear long pants inside. In fact, they wouldn't let you enter in shorts. So, outside the palace there were quite a few small shops renting sarongs and pants to people who weren't in dress code. We had our handy dandy zip off pants to wear, so we didn't look ridiculous wearing the rented clothes. I tried to get a picture of a guy wearing purple pants he had rented, but couldn't manage it!

Isn't this building gorgeous? The colors were fantastic! Towards the end of our time there we were just overwhelmed with the beauty of the place and it was hard to get excited for another fantastic building.

The shapes of the buildings were so different from anything we'd seen before. There were lots of people taking pictures, so sometimes it was a bit of a juggling act to get a picture without other people in it.

The buildings were huge, as you can see in relation to me. The Grand Palace was totally worth the entrance fee, so if you get a chance to go see it- do!

On Christmas Eve we traveled from Bangkok to Hua Hin which is a beach town about 3 hours from Bangkok. We only had one night there, but once we arrived we wished we could stay much longer. It was great!

After we arrived in town we wandered around checking out the beach, restaurants, markets, etc. I had seen on the internet that there was an international church that met at the Hilton, and we had talked about seeing if they were doing any special services while we were there, but we didn't know where the Hilton was. As we were walking along the beach we looked up, and there was the Hilton! So, we went inside to see what we could find out. At the time we were both in our bathing suits- totally not dressed for the Hilton! They told us the church would be having a Christmas Eve service in 30 minutes. We rushed down the road to a restaurant for dinner since we hadn't eaten in a long time and scarfed down some fabulous food and went to the service bathing suits and all! It was a wonderful service and we met some neat people and it was soooo nice to fellowship with brothers and sisters during this special holiday service. After the service we headed back to the hotel, but were distracted by a night market on the way where we spent a couple hours eating fun stuff and just hanging out there.

Christmas morning breakfast- mocha, vanilla latte, chocolate croissant and almond croissant! :) For most the trip we ate street food- lots of rice and noodles, but for Christmas morning I forced Uche to go to this coffee shop because I just couldn't do rice on Christmas morning!

This was our spot for Christmas Day. We sat here, swam, sat some more, ate, sat some more and swam again. It was super relaxing!

This was the first Christmas I'd spent at the beach. It's a great way to spend Christmas if you can't be home with family. There were lots of people to watch and the sand and breeze felt great!

The Hilton is the large hotel in the background. We didn't take too many pictures at the beach because we were too busy relaxing and enjoying it! :)

Unfortunately we had to leave Hua Hin Christmas night. We took a bus from there to Penang, Malaysia. I'm looking a little red as I wait for the bus...

Stay tuned for more trip pictures....

Happy New Year!

We got back from our Christmas trip the evening of Dec. 30, and we're still trying to organize our thoughts and pictures, so before I share about that, let's talk about New Year's Eve here in Manila. This was the first year I'd been in the Philippines for New Years (Uche's spent a few here) because I had always been visiting outside the country for Christmas when we lived here before. I've heard alot about the noise, partying, fireworks etc that happen here, so I wanted to experience it at least once. I have to say it was something else!

I've spent New Years with large crowds before, 50,000 for the year 2000 in Portland, OR, and 20,000+ at two different Urbana conferences, but last night was the noisiest ever! We got together with our neighbors for dinner, watched a movie and around 11:30 we went up to the roof to watch fireworks. People have been setting off fireworks here for weeks. All through the Christmas season you can hear and see them; the two big malls near us had a big fireworks show every Saturday throughout December, but the climax was last night. It was pretty noisy during dinner, but we could still carry on a normal conversation with each other. When we went up to our rooftop at 11:30 the noise of the fireworks and firecrackers was deafening. We had to shout in each other's ear to be heard! It went on like this for at least an hour before it settled down a little. I have no idea when it stopped because it was still pretty noisy when we went to sleep around 1:00 am.

I'm glad I was able to experience New Year's Eve here. I've never seen anything like it before, and I'm not sure where else I celebrate quite like that. According to our friends this year's celebration was a little subdued because people aren't doing as well financially as in years past, plus there were major national tragedies that occurred here during 2009. BUT if that was subdued.... I can't imagine what normal is like....

This is the group we had dinner with. We enjoyed tasty food and lots of laughs.

This scene was repeated on thousands of streets throughout the Philippines. So the noise was coming from the street and from the sky.

During the height of the fireworks. From every angle on our roof this is what we saw. It was pretty amazing.