Do we all look alike?

The other day I met two Latino gentlemen in town. The older one asked me if I was rooting for South Africa in the world cup? Do I look like I'm from SA? I didn't ask him that, but I just smiled and told him that I'm rooting for Nigeria cause I'm originally from Nigeria. The guy told me he was rooting for the USA team. I began to wonder why he said that since his own country made it to the World Cup. I didn't waste time in pointing that out to him. I said, "Well, it's good that Mexico made it". The guy smiled and said, "We're not from Mexico, we are from Nicaragua"
Anyway, I guess we all look alike. When it comes to World Cup, we identify ourselves not just by country, but by continent.

Napa Valley

I'm California born and raised, but there are still so many places I've never seen, and Napa Valley is one of them. We were really excited to spend a weekend there with some great friends of ours. The valley definitely didn't disappoint. It was gorgeous! The weather was cool and it even sprinkled the second day, but we had a lot of fun. A major highlight of the trip was that I had the best maple bar I've ever had- sorry, no pictures of that- I was too busy enjoying it!

Right as I took this picture, Uche made this gesture. Doesn't he look like he's giving a tour?

Our friends had brought food for a picnic- salami, lots of cheese and we bought a baguette and a bottle of sparkling juice to enjoy. None of us are wine drinkers, and obviously the main attraction of Napa is wine, but there's still a lot to enjoy without being a wine drinker.

We always like to throw in a self portrait. How do you like our fancy sunglasses we bought in Manila right before we left?

One of the must see places we heard about was this castle. I should start telling people we went to Europe- it's hard to believe this was taken in Northern California!

Here's my tour guide picture. The building in the back is part of the winery featured in the movie Bottle Shock. We had watched the movie the night before, so it was fun to see it in real life.

This was taken in the garden at the same winery. Most of the places we visited had gorgeous grounds like this.

We did take a tour. This was taken in the caves of a winery. The caves were pretty cool- literally- they stay at a temperature of 60 degrees year round no matter the weather outside.

We pulled over at the side of the road for a picnic on the second day. Here's what we looked at while we ate. The whole area was unbelievably beautiful, and I'm so glad we were able to enjoy it.

Uche learns to hug

There are two things that remind me that we are back in California. The first one is the allergies I get from pollen that turn my eyes red and watery. I also sneeze a lot which causes my nose to run, and I get a headache afterwards. I can sneeze up to six times in one long sneeze. I'm glad there are allergy pills that work for me.

The other reminder is the number of hugs I recieve from our church family and friends. Their hugs are quite infectious and it shows how much the people here love. Each time Sarah and I return back to Redding, our home in the States, we always recieve a tremendous amount of warm hugs from almost everyone in our church, that's a lot of hugs. It sure blows my socks off how much the people here are able to show love in different ways including hugging. I've been infected and I don't think twice before I hug people back. I also initiate hugs sometimes! I remember when we first arrived in Manila and I ran into a Filipino friend. Out of excitement I reached out and gave him a warm bear hug but afterwards I realized that he wasn't too excited about it and I told myself that this guy would be hugging every one of his friends too if he spends only one year in Oak Grove (our church in Redding), that is unless he is my father in law who is probably the only one in our church who doesn't hug (but he doesn't love any less either).

Every hug I recieve here reminds me how warm and loving and accepting the people here are and I love them all a lot. I aslo love the way they hug.

Festivities

So, it's been a long time since we updated the blog, and that's because we've been very busy- having a lot of fun! We got some work done too... We were excited to participate in graduation even though we are technically summer graduates. It was fun pretending to graduate, and we were able to finish our thesis a few days after graduation, which left us with a couple weeks free to have fun and spend time with our friends. This will be a picture heavy post as we walk you through our last days in the Philippines. We're sitting in the airport getting ready to board our flight to Taiwan and then onto California, and it was fun to look through these pictures- they made us smile!

This was taken after the Baccalaureate chapel. This is group are all Community Development students. They're a great group of people, and we have thoroughly enjoyed learning together with these people.

The evening after chapel we went out with our friends who live in our building. We were all graduating, so it was a real celebration! Taco Bell!

This was at the banquet they had before graduation. It was fun to see everyone dressed up. Sitting next to Sarah is a great friend of ours. It's not fun to leave these great people who we have gotten to know the past year and a half.

The big day! This was taken as we lined up to walk into the church.

The graduates! We were hooded by our program director (the hood sits on top of the robe) as they read a short biography about us.

The day after graduation we had a party up on our roof to spend some time with our friends who were graduating and leaving Manila in the days following graduation. No party in the Philippines is complete without some karaoke- so we gave the neighborhood a nice concert! :)

The week after graduation was Holy Week, and because this is a Catholic country this is a very special week. The Thursday and Friday before Easter everything shuts down- the malls close, the roads are empty and people head out of Manila. We joined some friends from church and spent a couple days at the ocean. We did a little snorkeling as you can see from this picture!

The tide was low the first evening we headed to the beach. Here's a couple starfish doing something... get a room already!

Uche with a totally different starfish than the loving couple seen above!

The next week we were taken on a short trip to a place in the mountains outside of Manila. It's much cooler in this area, so it's a popular place to visit. Our friend took us to a wonderful hotel for an evening. It was a great place! If you look closely, you can see Sarah in the background. She's actually in the bathroom! There's a window above the jacuzzi tub, so you can sit in the tub and watch tv! The bed had a down comforter and feather pillows- luxury!!

This is the front of the hotel. It was so beautiful.

Here's our group in the lobby. It's kind of weird to see a fireplace in the Philippines, but it's much much cooler here than Manila, so it may even be used during the cooler months! If nothing else it makes a nice place to take a picture.

This was the view from our room! It looked very European to us with the pine trees, mountains and hotel in the background. It was a very refreshing trip, and we enjoyed the company of our great friends!

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.