Moving Day!

Turning over a few new leaves in my life. One is blogging. You can find me at my new blog (hopefully with a bit more frequency): www.becsblogs.wordpress.com

Recap and Upcoming

A RECAP SINCE MY LAST POST...
- Faith Academy's Talent Night - Whoa! These kids are really talented!
- High School Spiritual Emphasis Week - Fran Sciacca came all the way from Birmingham, Alabama. Really cool! Check out his website at www.handsofhur.org/Faith/ for the five sessions he did here.
- Quilting Day - I'm really a novice. I mostly just watched these amazing women put together incredible creations.
- Rugby - Tim's last rugby game of the 2008-2009 season. They won! It was a great way to end the season.
- Dad Visits - My dad came up for meetings and we got to hang out for one night.
- Middle School Outdoor Education Week - The week had me doing all sorts of crazy things like encouraging my squad of 13 Grade 7 girls as they did a high ropes course, ministered at an Ayta village, created an award-winning lizard in a sand sculpture contest, hike through the jungle, make our own plates and utensils out of bamboo, and eat bats. Find me on facebook and you can see three albums of pictures!
- Korean Culture Day - The Korean Studies Department hosted a day filled with Korean games, traditional clothes, music, and yummy food! Check out the picture below of my Oral Interp. class. Either they really enjoyed things or they were keen on getting out of class.
- Truth Seminar - I sat on a panel with 2 other women as we talked with the majority of the high school girls about developing healthy body images. Powerful!
- Women's Retreat - Left the city for 2 nights to go to a retreat with 60 other missionary women. Added bonus was having my mom join me as she was already up here for meetings.
- Amos and Heidi - My friends from my childhood came back for quick trip so that Amos could help put an airplane together after it was shipped here. It was so good to see them!
- EDSA Revolution Day - A fantastic day off of school! Actually had time to catch my breath after being out of town for the weekend for the retreat.
- Amanda! - My friend Amanda came from the USA to spend 5 (very short) days with me. It was so wonderful to introduce her to my life here. She met my friends, saw Faith Academy, went an adventure-filled mini-vacation to the beach with me, attended my church, and did some shopping. Oh, and we read books! We wondered aloud as to what people who don't read do on vacation.
- NHS Celebration - I serve as an advisor to the Faith Academy chapter of the National Honor Society. We inducted 38 new members this year in a 35-minute ceremony (short, sweet, and to the point).
- And Dormsitting - I seem to have time to actually post these blogs when I'm dormsitting. AND UPCOMING...
- Classroom Management Seminar - I'm going to be presenting the 1 1/2 hour seminar to a group of Korean educators. I'm really excited to share stories and help each other in this very difficult area of teaching!
- End of 3rd Quarter - Agh! All the projects that need to be collected, the essays that need to be graded, the culmination of yet another quarter. It's always a little scary.
- Spring Break - I'll be sticking around Manila. Bring on the books and the sleep!
- Kota Kinabalu - I'm heading to Malaysia to attend an education conference. I learned so much last year and I'm looking forward to seeing how this year's conference changes what I do in the classroom. I'm also excited about perhaps seeing more of Malaysia than I was able to see last year.
- And oh so much more. That's the life of a teacher.

Another Week Comes to an End

And so the second week of the semester comes to an end. I had this feeling this week of juggling too many balls and starting to drop those balls. I bought a little checkbook-sized planner this week. I really must get on top of all that is happening and work on keeping things running smoothly.

Every year the entire middle school leaves the city for a week to go on Outdoor Ed. Logistically, it is a completely overwhelming week. But not only is the week itself overwhelming, the many weeks leading up to the actual week can be a stressful time. I am co-leading a squad of 13 Grade 7 girls. We have squad meetings each Friday in which we have different tasks that we must complete. Recent squad meetings have had us trying to decide on a squad name (the Banaba Babaes, if you're wondering), a t-shirt design (caricatures of our cute faces), coming up with a squad cheer, learning songs to sing at our ministry day, and overall bonding. There are three very distinct groups of friends in our squad and it is hard to get everyone working together at times.

Yesterday, we took the bonding to another level by having a sleepover in my high school classroom. I'm so very thankful for my co-leader. Julie is fantastic! The evening was filled with watching a HS girls basketball game, lots of pizza, watching the sunset, me brushing out my hair, learning three songs for our ministry day, an Amazing Race, Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken, brownies in bed, and Truth or Dare. My hair apparently was a big hit. No doubt that it was big too. I usually wear my hair up since it can get so warm. They wanted to see it down and I decided to take it a bit further. I had to buy a brush especially for the occasion.

During the rounds and rounds of Truth or Dare, I shoved my earphones in and fell asleep. Although I was asked numerous times to join in, I passed. I really don't think they wanted me to know all of the juicy details they shared. That might be a bit awkward come Monday when I'm at the front of the class knowing all sorts of info.

This morning, an alarm went off at 5:30. No idea why someone needed to be up that early! Thankfully, the girls kept sleeping. We ended our morning with breakfast in the senior hall together.

Despite my lack of preparation and organization, the whole thing went off so much better than I expected! And I think I even had a good time.

A Weekend in Los Banos

I had a great weekend away from Manila. You wouldn't think that I would need a weekend out of the city after being back for just a week but it was just what I needed. I've been meaning to visit Dwayne and Gladys for ages but it just has never worked out. My weekends are generally full of busy-ness and craziness. Last semester we said that it must absolutely happen in the 3rd quarter. So what better weekend than the first weekend?

Dwayne and Gladys came all the way out to Faith to pick me up on Friday afternoon. What a blessing! Taking a bus or some other method of public transportation just wouldn't have been as fun. Despite the fact that we hit rush hour traffic, we had nice conversations in the car. And who can beat a stop at Yellow Cab? They do pizza right.

Saturday was a very full day! Gladys showed me a bit of the town and a few things they are involved in. And we ate banana-que. Oh so delicious! We went back to the house where I laid down for my first nap. Ridiculous to nap before lunch but I think I was a bit tired after trying to get back into the school thing. Lunch at the house. A little more reading. I finished two of my young adult books - Freak the Mighty and Among the Hidden.

In the afternoon, Gladys and I went up to a squatter village where Gladys does a Bible lesson with heaps of kids each Saturday. They were so cute! I mostly just took pictures and tried to listen carefully to figure out what Gladys was saying in Tagalog. I think I got a fair bit of it.

Handing out nametags.

Everyone wanted to answer the question.

Coloring is a big deal.

Oh so cute!

Everyone gathers to say goodbye.

After the Bible lesson, Gladys and I were off to check out the "baths." Los Banos - taken from Spanish "los banyos" - the baths. The whole community is surrounded by hot springs! Even the water at the house is definitely warmer than what we usually have in Manila. When you drive down the main road, there are hundreds of resorts lining the road and then even more with attendents out on the road waving to you, hoping that you'll go down the little side street that will lead to their "resort." We found a fairly clean one. There was one main pool and a kiddie pool. The water felt like lukewarm bath water until you went down to the covered end where a big fountain was spurting HOT water into the pool. It was painful to the touch and you couldn't stand under it for very long. Fun, nonetheless. It would've been a shame to go to Los Banos and never visit one of the baths.

After a good swim and a beautiful view of a full moon through the palm trees, we headed back to the house to pick up Dwayne and the girls to go to Arla for dinner. Arla is this amazingly cute restaurant that is owned and run by a former Faith classmate of mine. PJ does such an amazing job there! Such delicious food and a great time of catching up a little bit. I got to meet her husband and her two boys. Missed out on her little girl because she was asleep though.

I was her first classmate to come to her restaurant! A great privilege for me.

Today (Sunday) felt even more full. We went to church. What an amazing feeling to worship with other believers even when you can't always understand what's going on. I had the benefit of knowing all of the English praise and worship songs but not so lucky with the sermon. It was all in Tagalog. Wow, I really need to work on my Tagalog.

Dwayne and I went out for coffee while Gladys and the girls had Sunday school. I feel so blessed to have shared the coffee and conversations.

When Sunday school was finished, we started our trek back to Manila. Halfway back we took a detour up to Tagaytay. Tagaytay overlooks Taal. I can't believe I've lived so close and have never been there. Taal is an active volcano but what makes it even more strange is that the volcano is surrounded by a crater lake and then there's another crater lake inside of the volcano. It's so crazy.

We ate lunch at a BEAUTIFUL hotel that overlooks the whole expanse. It was a bit cloudy today but I think you might be able to imagine how divine it must look with the sun shining down on it. Lunch was delicious too. I had a roast beef sandwich and a bowl of minestrone soup. The soup was absolutely necessary because it was so freezing cold up there! Oh my goodness. Even my sweater did not help much.

Taal

So now here I am back at home. I've been working on school stuff for the past two hours and I have a bit more to do before I'll be prepared for class tomorrow. I just felt that I had to share about my weekend though.

Moments of Indecision

I had a blog entry on here a couple days ago that I ended up taking off. The message that it conveyed is not one that I want to promote. As in any country, there are truly ridiculous things that can happen to you. However, I think that post accomplished little to express my love for this place. This country has been my home for more than 10 years now and I want people to love it as much as I do.

My apologies if you missed the first post and this message is cryptic. You can e-mail me personally if you want more details.

Of Rugby, Scooters, and Christmas Coming

With the -ber months come Christmas celebrations. The word-play is a little skewed. Brr, it's cold outside meets SeptemBER, OctoBER, NovemBER, DecemBER. With no major holidays like Halloween or Thanksgiving, the Christmas celebrations are in full swing by the middle of September. My FX ride (one option for public transportation) into town the other night was filled with one Christmas song after another on the road. Everything from "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" to "O, Holy Night" on one station. I am excited about the Christmas season. At Eat the Book this week, we began to look at the narratives of Christ's birth. I just can't tell you how much this Sunday school class is teaching me! I'm working on doing the class for credit through Asian Theological Seminary. So worth it!

On a completely different note, I've been looking for a scooter recently. I am ready for a new level of independence in my life. I hope that I'm not putting too much stock in these two wheels. I looked at my first one today. It is an incredibly stress-filled experience for me. The bike that I'm currently looking at is not owned by someone I know. In fact, this afternoon's adventure involved an attempt to find the motorcycle shop during rush hour, in the rain, when the national school's were just letting out. Not good timing.

We got to the shop and I asked to see the bike. It wasn't there. Not a great sign. There is much discussion in Tagalog and two of the guys hop onto another scooter with an umbrella and go cruising down the road. Adios...I guess. Debi, Tim, and I just sat there staring at each other. Okay...I guess we'll wait. We stood around for 20 minutes or so when the two guys come back on two bikes. Here it is. We look it over and it looks pretty good for the most part but we don't know exactly what we're looking for. Tim took it for a little illegal spin up the road. He said it felt pretty good. We asked a bunch of questions...first owner? Any accidents? Stock parts? Hopefully tomorrow they'll bring the bike up to campus so that one of the school's mechanics can look it over and put it through it's paces. We're also hoping that they'll bring a police clearance with them to prove that it's not stolen.

This is a pretty big deal for me though. My stomach has been in knots for most of the past two days as I think over some of the implications of this new mode of transportation. One rather uneasy thing...I have seen far more motorcycle accidents since I made the decision to go ahead with getting a bike. I also want to make sure that I get a solid deal on this thing. I would rather not fork over cash for a dud.

And finally, rugby. Rugby took over Tim's life last week and a small part of mine. He played on the Philippine National Under 20 Rugby Team for a two game tournament against Guam. He was originally supposed to travel to Korea with them but that got cancelled when two of the teams backed out. So Guam came to the Philippines instead. We could have played the game "Which of these things is not like the other" when it came to photos of the team. See:

I was incredibly proud of the way that he played and the way that he stood up for his faith during the past couple of weeks. It had to be hard but he did it. My mom also survived. She was here in Manila for the final on Saturday. Tim went into this game knowing that his mom may put the kibosh on rugby altogether. It was intense! Some of the plays really made Mom nervous but I think she also saw how much he loved the game.

So now the Faith rugby season starts. I'm looking forward to Saturday tournaments and watching him play. I absolutely know how privileged I am to be sharing this part of his life with him. Who would've ever thought?

Nifty Wordle Art

Here's my wordle art for this blog. What a very cool concept! Apparently I write a lot about school in this blog.

A couple words of excitement and caution:
1. Wordle can take text or URLs and create a piece of word art. I already checked out some very interesting ones that took text from "Pride and Prejudice" or "The Odyssey" and created some very interesting (and telling) pieces of art.
2. Once Wordle has created a piece for you, you can take out words that you do not want to appear on your piece. A wonderful feature when you consider that you wouldn't really want that identifying information out there on the web.
3. You can change the font, the color, the "verticalness" or "horizontalness" of your words.
4. A NOTE OF CAUTION - Once you "save to gallery," the piece is there for anyone to see. You can see here that the website creator has no plans to erase any of them.

Have fun carefully wordle-ing!