Time is flying
Wow its July 13th. Dang. Time is absolutely flying by. I hope all of you are well, thank you for your continued prayers and support.
I left off at the Bible school in Sn. Fabian. Its been a few days since then so I’ll try to catch you up. After leaving Sn. Fabian Thursday morning, Darwin and I traveled to Bagabag to tour the SIL facility there. Our original plans were to stay overnight there, but SIL is closing down the facility and no longer allow visitors overnight. It’s a sprawling compound with a lot of buildings and even its own airport. This facility is located in the middle of the northern mountains in the Philippines so back in the day before many of the roads were paved, a tiny plane was necessary to shuttle supplies to remote missionaries. The need has gradually declined and is now mostly non-existent and the operating costs of the facility are high, so SIL is shutting it down and handing it over to the government. It was a beautiful place and seemed like a wonderful place to live.
This is a picture of the road going in:
We then drove to Lagawe to observe the translation work that was going on there. We met an American missionary there, Ann West. There was also a team of Filipino’s who were working on the translation. The team is made of up 3 Filipino women, Ann is just a consultant, there to help with any questions they have. She is a wonderful woman and was incredibly friendly and helpful to me. She has been in the country for 43 years now, I think Darwin said she is 70 years old. She started from the beginning and started explaining everything about how translation work is done, from surveys and such to semantics and then to problems with translations. She shared with me some problems they ran into that day in translating the book of Job, it was incredibly interesting and thought provoking. It made my head hurt for a bit, but it was also extremely exciting to actually get a taste of what my future is. I was actually getting real hands on experience to what I’ll hopefully be doing one day.
In the mountains the people are always spitting these immense amounts of red colored spit. It looked like tocacco spit and its really gross. It stains the ground and smells terrible and there are signs everywhere telling people not to spit there. I found it its a weird mixture of a tobacco leaf, some sort of nut, and a small piece of lime. Its used to get rid of hunger and it makes you salivate a ton. The mountain people view staving off hunger and eating less meals as a strength so they love chewing this in order to help their strength. It can be known as “moma”. It led to this hilarious sign, I hope you think its as funny as I do.
The next day, Friday, Darwin and I woke up and ate breakfast in the city with Ann and then wandered for a while because she had work to do and we didn’t have a schedule. We ended up back at the house where the translation is taking place and she showed me a little more of what they were doing. Its very confusing but also very stimulating to work through a translation and double check it. I’m real happy at how much I could pick up and keep along with because of some of my training so far in school. It was encouraging.
On Saturday we woke up real early, 4 am, and drove back to Baguio. I was exhausted. I had been on the go traveling from place to place with no real rest since June 9th, and only a few days before that I traveled for 24 hours to get here. Needless to say I was really looking forward to talking with my parents and Krista and resting for a few days. We got back around 10 am and I rested for the remainder of the day until dinner, when I met with RuthAnn at Pizza Hut for dinner. It was just the two of us and it was really good to be able to share my experiences so far with her, my frustrations and the good things. She laughed throughout the whole recap, even at the real difficult parts, and it really put things in a good light. At the time, a lot of the frustrations I had weren’t funny at all, but looking back some of the things really were quite comical and ridiculous. It was fun. She also had two women traveling with her and they were really nice as well.
Sunday we went to church and Sunday night Darwin and the other church elders meet for bowling. I went along this time. Its a lot of fun. All of them speak very good English so I could actually interact and communicate with the people. My first game I bowled an 81, it was a warmup. Then I busted out a 157 and ended at 108. It was a good night for me, I was proud of myself. A 115 average isn’t too shabby. While we were waiting for some stragglers to finish up there games, one of the Pastors invited me to play some 9 ball with him. I got demolished, my billiards are a little more rusty than bowling. Oh well.
I ended up going to bed Sunday night and setting my alarm for 2 am for the World Cup final. I got up and put on my Holland jersey for good luck, only to witness a heartbreaking loss. Robben blew his chance in the first break away, not to take anything away from the amazing save made by the Spanish keeper, but he should have put that in. Oh well, I do have to admit that Spain was the better team. I really enjoyed watching it though.
I slept in till around 11 and rested until dinner when RuthAnn and her friends came over for pizza and fellowship. We sat around the table for a couple of hours and had a really good time. It was fun.
Today is Tuesday. I again rested and relaxed today, but was productive as well. I sent off some emails, typed up this blog and cleaned up my room a bit. It was a good day for me.
Well like I said time is flying. I’m supposed to go on a trip this weekend for another medical mission but there is a typhoon coming and supposed to hit later this week at the same spot that the mission is at, so our plans to travel are tentative right now. Other than that, I have no other plans here. Its crazy how time flies. Again, thanks for your prayers and I’ll try to keep this interesting in the next couple of weeks.
