Last post about game time

I was truly blessed to get to do game time on this trip. By the last couple of days, we had about 100 kids playing the games with that many more looking on. There was a number of adults looking on as well. Somebody told me that Bro. Mike or Mary has recently talked with the church over there and they said that the next time we come that the adults wanted to play too.


Yes, in this picture I have a shirt on with the sleeves cut out. Yes, some people think that makes me a redneck. Well, it was hot hot hot hot....at least I was a coolerish(is that a word?) redneck.


That is their school in the background, btw.

I'm so glad my mother-in-law took this picture.

This was the second day that we had game time and one of those defining moments I was talking about in an earlier post. I think that as soon as school ended that 50 or so kids came to the church so we would quit working and get game time going as soon as possible. As we walked down the road to the school, there must've been between 60-70 kids walking with us by the time we got to the main road. I was in the front (sorta like the pied piper with my duffle bag full of game time goodies) for a block I guess and then suddenly I was overcome with emotion. I started to cry and not one of those little crys with the tears gently falling down one cheek. I was crying one of those kind that distorts your whole face....one that makes the muscles in your neck sore....one that makes you look like a complete mess. I thought to myself that I couldn't let these kids and the people watching us walk by see me like that so I started walking slower trying to gain my composure. I really really felt God at that moment. I felt a stripped down humbleness that I've never felt before. I felt a deeper appreciation for what Christ did for me on the cross. You know, we spend millions of dollars a year on books and seminars trying to figure out what our purpose is and what we should do with our life. At that moment, it was so simple to me and the simpleness in itself brought on another wave of emotion. Of course we know to love God....that's a given....but also, just love on people with the love of Christ. That's it. Don't witness at them. Don't throw programs at them. Show them what being a Christian is and what Christ has done for you by example. Love on them with agape love. No big formulas, programs or gimmics.....just be real. The thing is, I already knew this.....I really did...but at that moment, it was made so real to me that it nearly brought me to my knees.

That's Gilbert on my left side. He never left my side that whole time. I guess my red eyes and contorted face didn't scare him away. He just held on to the corner of my shirt and would look up from time to time and hold his hand up for me to give him high five....smiling from ear to ear the whole time. That's all the kids wanted really. Some agape love....a smile, a high five, a pat on the head, and just a little of our time. It's really hard to put the moment in that picture into words. Just know that Gilbert's high fives were helping me much more than they were helping him.

Game Time

On the first day of game time, things started out a little slow. I think everybody was hanging back to see what in the world we were going to do with a bunch of pins, bean bags and rope. There were several kids that played, but there were more kids that just stood and watched. I could see a lot of adults off in the background watching too. It went well though. The kids picked up the games very quick and seemed to really have a good time. In game time, the kids are split into 4 teams with each team having a team color.....red, blue, green or yellow. On most games, only one person from each team is competing while the rest of his or her team is cheering them on by yelling their team color. These kids bought into that wide open. They screamed their team colors at the top of their lungs and when a person from their team would win, the whole line of kids would scream and jump up and down. Their enthusiasm was just too cool. Each team is also lead by an adult leader. I just want to say that our leaders did such a great job of getting everybody involved and showing those kids the love of Christ and just plain getting excited. You can't have game time without good team leaders. Mary was also a huge help because she helps in gametime at church so she's familiar with the games, and over there she could translate and get the kid's attention like nobody else could.

After game time, we would take the walk back up to the church and have bible school. The kids chanted their team colors almost all the way.

Trivia: On the day this picture was taken, who played a donkey complete with a youth pastor on his back in the skit for bible school?


Answer: the large american

game time

I think I'm going to move past talking about the work part of the trip. We basically got everything finished that we set out to do. We did leave some things for the locals to do that I wish we could've finished up ourselves. That'll be next trip..... ;-)


My main responsiblility on this trip was to plan and lead game time for the kids. I love working in game time during AWANA at our church so it was a natural fit for me. The local school was very gracious in letting us use their school yard for our games. The ladies that went on the trip with us witnessed door to door and visited people during the day but they took time out the first day to clean the area up and paint the AWANA circle and square on the ground. To get to the school, we walked about 2 blocks from the church until we hit the main road. We then took a left and walked about a block to this alley in the picture. You can see the school yard in the background at the end of the alley. That's a store on the left of the picture. On the first day we did games, we probably had 25 kids walk with us from the church. School was just letting out so there were a lot of kids just hanging around the school yard waiting to see what was going on.

Here's another pic of the restroom work. From left to right:

William: He's half American...his father left him there at age 3. His time in the service was over and he headed home. More on William later.

Mickey: Mickey was a popular guy over there. The kids loved him and so did a certain young lady. Mick says he could live over there.

Randy: He's our youth pastor at church. We had a few laughs at Randy's expense....funny that Randy worked on the restroom and one of the laughs came from his airplane restroom experience.

Rico: Rico put me to shame on American history and his english wasn't too bad either. More on the guy that said "death to the large american" later.

Aaron: Aaron smiled like this the whole time....didn't matter if it was 95 degrees or if he was in mud up to his ankles. Dude really loves life and the Lord.

Joel: It's cool to be able to go on a mission trip with your father in law. He, like the guys I posted about earlier, has been on many trips and I learned a lot from him. He's definitely a "witness as you go" type of guy.

Then there's me. Wondering why God would allow me to have the blessing to serve Him by working on a restroom on the other side of the world in 90 degree weather.

I mostly worked on the restroom part of the project. We were all so excited to be there and get started that we all failed to get a picture of the bathroom before we started changing things. In this picture, we had already taken the old roof off and added 4 blocks to the height of the walls. We decided that the walls were too flimsy to set the roof on them so we had to put 6 posts in the ground to set the roof on. I think this was the second full day of work. By this time I was getting a little frustrated to be honest. It seemed like everything we did had to be re-done. My frustration wasn't really that we were having to re-do some things, it was the impression that we were giving to the locals that were working with us. I was sure they were thinking, "and those silly Americans thought they were coming over here to help us......yea right". They do things differently over there....and they have to. It took me a little while to figure that concept out. The blocks would crumble if you laid them on the ground too hard, the lumber was rough cut at best and the tools at hand were certainly not DeWalt or Craftsman. I probably just got a little too uptight and should have went with the flow the locals had going on a little more. I kept my frustration to myself (I think) and tried to keep a postive attitude. By the end of the day, I was a little discouraged with the results so far and shared that with Bro. Mike. He told me that while we had gone down to the school to do gametime, that 4 of the guys we had been working with had said they wanted Christ as their savior and were going to be baptized on Sunday. For me, this was one of 3 or 4 defining moments in the trip when everything comes into focus just a little better. Awesome.

This picture was taken as we were putting the rafters on the restroom. I'm the guy up by the rafters with the white shirt and sunglasses on.

more pics

I thought I would post a couple pics of the guys that did most of the work on the water pump project. One is a picture of the 2 Bobbys (that's what they were known as on this trip) and the other is a picture of Menvil washing his shoes with the newly installed faucet at the back of the church. It was cool to be on this trip with these guys because all 3 of them have been on several mission trips. I learned a lot from all of them.

the tank

This is a picture of the tank at the top of the hill. All they have to do now is flip a switch on the back wall of the church and the pump fills the tank. Then they turn the switch off when the tank is full. Water is then gravity fed back down to 2 faucets at the church and also down to the bathrooms that are a few feet below the church. If you imagine a baseball diamond, I'm standing at second base taking the pic, the church is 3rd base, the bathrooms are 1st base and the tank would be home plate. If that makes any sense at all.....just trying to show how things are laid out.

This is the hill that I was talking about earlier that they had to climb to get water up to the church. The well was directly behind me in this pic. We clumsy Americans stayed on our behinds a lot on that hill. That's a pretty good shot of the water line running up the hill that we installed also. That's the back of the church, by the way.

Some more pictures

This picture is of the well where their water came from. I don't know if you can see it, but there is a creek about 8ft away from the well on the left side. I'm sure this is where the water in the well came from. There were several ducks swimming around in it and there were cows grazing on the opposite hill. So when we were told not to drink the water....it didn't take much convincing for me.

work overview

Once we got to the church on that first day, we did a run down of what jobs we had to do and what supplies we would need. The general idea was to work during the day and then have bible school in the evenings. At first, I thought to myself that we didn't have nearly enough work to keep all of us busy for the days that we were going to be there. Little did I know that we didn't have nearly as much time as I thought we did. We were 11 degrees off the equator so we had almost exactly 12hrs of daylight each day. For some reason, I had it in my mind that it would be about like summers in Kentucky....sunrise about 6:30 and sunset around 9pm. Not even close. Considering we were staying 20min away from the church and the fact that it took two Jeepney trips to get all of us on site, our work time was actually very short. And, the day was cut even shorter because the ladies of the church prepared 3 big meals a day. Believe it or not, there were several times when I would want to just keep working to finish something but would have to clean up and go in and eat so I wouldn't appear to be rude and ungrateful.

We had 3 basic jobs that needed to be worked on during the week.
1. Install a water pump to pump water up a hill to a holding tank that was on the highest part of the church's property. This was probably the most important of all the jobs. The ladies had been carrying water up a steep and slippery hill (my behind experienced this hill more than once) which was very inconvenient even for over there.

2. Run water pipe from the holding tank to the restrooms and install toilets. This job turned out to be bigger than originally planned. Connie, the founder of the church and go-to person on this trip, decided to make the walls taller and to extend the restrooms to make room for 2 shower stalls. So, we had to rip the old roof off and install a new one and lay block for the extention. And I was afraid of running out of work...hehe.

3. Dig out from under the church for potential sunday school rooms. The church was already several feet off the ground at the front and just needed to be evened up in the back.

We hired a lot of the local guys to help on these three jobs which did 3 things: It gave them a job and some income they wouldn't normally get. It helped us because we weren't used to the heat and mud and never would've gotten finished without their help. It also gave us a chance to work with them and build relationships that we wouldn't have got to build otherwise.

Overall, it was a very full week as far as the work days went. It was hot, muddy most of the time, and downright draining. It was good though......a true blessing to get to work with the guys on the team and with the guys from that area.

A view off the front porch.

I thought I would post a pic of the view off the front porch of the church. It truly was a beautiful area that we were in. The church was located about 2 blocks off the main road and was very close to what I would call the jungle. It's hard to explain how cool it was to see the church for the first time. We had traveled through some sad towns and villages. I saw mounds of trash piled up in many front yards where we might see toys piled up over here. It was refreshing to see the church and it's flower garden out front and to see the care that was taken to make the grounds around the church look so good. My first reaction was that this was a special place that the locals really cared about. (click the picture to enlarge and you may be able to make out the cross in the lower right of the picture)

Church

This is a picture of the church where we did our work. Our church has taken this church as our sister church. It was started as a children's ministry by Mary's sister who works in the States. She funded the construction of the church and still takes a big hand in it financially. She was also visiting while we were there.

This is a picture taken as we were loading the bus in Tacloban. The bus ride was actually longer because we did a bit of sight seeing out of the way. We saw where McArthur came ashore in WW2 and where the American flag was first raised during the war.

The day that never seemed to end.

Like I said in my earlier post, we left Steubenville Baptist Church at 5am on Monday Jan. 30th. We landed in Tacloban on Jan. 31st around 7pm. It all seemed like one big day. After a 2hr bus ride to Lexington, we flew out to Detroit where we waited for an hour or so in the airport. Then came the longest leg of the trip....a 13hr flight from Detroit to Nagoya, Japan. We basically got off the plane there and walked through security and right back on the same plane for a 4hr flight to Manila. I remember looking at a clock as we went through customs in Manila and it was midnight which was 11am on Jan. 31st at home. After getting through customs, we had to round up all of our luggage and meet Mary's sisters who lived in Manila. By the way, Mary is from the area where we went on this trip. Bro. Mike met her while he was in the Navy and working at a hospital in the Philippines.

We met Mary's sisters and they had arranged for 2 Jeepneys to take us to another airport in Manila where we would catch our flight to Tacloban. After loading all the luggage into one Jeepney, only half of us would fit into the other Jeepney. So, half of us went and half of us stayed. I was in the half that stayed outside the airport and waited for the other Jeepney to come back and get us. Man, the heat hit me like a ton of bricks. I still had on lined Nike pants and long sleeved shirt under a short sleeved shirt. In all of our meetings it was stressed that nobody goes anywhere alone. So Aaron and I dug through our carry-on luggage and found some shorts and went to the nearest restroom to change. This is the only time during the trip that I almost felt like a girl but it was worth it. Shorts never felt so good! The other Jeepney came to get us in a few minutes and we were soon reunited with the rest of the group at the other airport. It seems like we were there for hours and hours. I'm guessing we were in the same spot on the floor for about 5hrs. Some people slept but there was no way that I could. I read my bible quite a bit and fiddled with my camera. Finally, we started moving and before I knew it we were on a nice mid-sized plane that was fairly comfortable. The flight from Manila to Tacloban was only about an hour long and was quite nice. We landed in Tacloban where we then loaded a bus for a 2hr bus ride to our final destination.

Travel

Now, fast forward through several meetings and a few changes in the direction of the trip.

We met at the church on Monday, Jan. 30th at 4:30am in the morning to head out to Lexington for our first flight. It was so tough leaving home that morning. I knew we had what amounted to 6 different flights and 18,000 miles of traveling to do before I would get to see my wife and son again. Of course, thoughts ran through my head like "what if this is the last time I will ever see them?". I must've kissed Jacob a thousand times that morning....course he had no clue because he was sleeping like a log. It was just as tough leaving Amy. We've known each other for almost 14 years now and having been married for 7 years, she knows me better than anyone else. I really lucked out in the wife department because she really is my best friend and she's gorgeous to boot. :)

It was a long 4 mile drive to the church. I was excited for sure, but sad to leave my family. I had been battling doubts for the last couple of weeks. Should I even be on this trip? I usually have music blaring in my truck but I distinctly remember muting it that morning. There were thousands of thoughts running through my head, some serious, some funny and some downright stupid. I'm amazed at how my mind works so early (early for me anyways) in the morning.

I arrived at the church and Bro. Mike met me at my truck hoping I had a key to the Family Life Center. He didn't want to have to run home to get his key. Luckily, I had my key with me. We had packed our 40 passenger church bus on Saturday with our luggage, which took up nearly half the bus, and parked the bus in the FLC. In an earlier meeting, Bro. Mike told us to ask him on the morning we left if he had our plane tickets from Manila to Tacloban just to be certain they weren't left behind. They were actual paper tickets where as all our other tickets came from simply swiping our passports and getting printed boarding passes. I jokingly asked Bro. Mike if he had our tickets knowing he probably had them in his coat pocket. He looked in a couple of his bags....asked Mary, his wife, about the tickets.....looked again and then proceeded to run home to get the tickets. He made it home and back to church with tickets in hand before the 5am leave time which was good. Some of us began to joke that his grandaughter had hidden the tickets because she had cried so much not wanting him to go. It would've been terrible to get to Manila to find out we had no tickets to go on to Tacloban.

I said all of that to say this: I think God used those two simple little things that morning to let me know that I was indeed supposed to be on the trip and that everything would be fine. It may sound silly to some that God would use a key to the FLC and question about tickets as confirmation but I really believe He did. So, from that point on, I was ready for what was ahead of us. A handful of people came out to see us off from the church and we were led in prayer by a dear friend named Nick and with that we were off.

Planning

Planning for this mission trip started about a year ago. I knew at that time that I should go but I let excuses get in my way and didn't jump on board right away. Last September, the trip was well into the planning stages and Bro. Mike, our pastor, approached me about going again. I hesitated once again but it started to occur to me that it seemed as if God had taken away every excuse that I had for not going. It was a Saturday that Bro. Mike and I had talked and by Sunday afternoon I was at my first mission trip meeting. I still didn't know what I would be doing on the trip and almost had the attitude of "what in the world am I doing here?". Later in the meeting we talked about conducting a bible school in the evenings and the subject of games came up. Games came up I think as a way just to fill some time. I help lead gametime for Awana at our church and I knew from experience that gametime could be much more than just a time filler. I knew then what I would be doing on the trip. For me, it's so easy to make relationships with the kids and just pay attention to them in a Christ-like way during gametime and it doesn't hurt that I'm just a big overgrown kid anyways. I remember being so excited after that meeting.....there's nothing like knowing you are in the center of God's will in at least one area of your life.

First Post

OK. I went on a mission trip during the time of Jan. 30th-Feb. 9th 2006. I figured the story of the mission trip was as good a time as any to start a blog. So here goes.