back to the start: the philippines

I’m going to back track over the past 10 months for awhile. I’ve processed a lot of the things I walked through the first several months of the Race, and want to share more with you on what has happened since I’ve been gone.

M O N T H  O N E: T H E  P H I L L I P I N E S, PT 1

When my team, XOXO, arrived in the city of Tacloban, we were full exhausted from a very long travel day from Atlanta, Georgia to Tacloban, on the island of Leyte. We left Georgia at around 10 a.m. and traveled to LA, where we had a rather long layover. We left the states at midnight, on an overnight flight to Taiwan. Upon arriving in Taiwan, we had a 4 hour layover, and we then flew to Manila. Once we arrived in Manila, my team had one more, very short, flight to Tacloban.

We arrived at our ministry location after dark, and we were very excited to see our dinner on the table–my team leader’s favorite–spaghetti, salad, and garlic bread. Our hosts were very kind and loving right off the bat.

Needless to say, we fell asleep VERY quickly. It hadn’t hit me since we’d left yet that I wasn’t in the states any more.

The first week in the Philippines was HARD. The second week was HARDER. The third week was EVEN HARDER. The last week was JOY.

Our scheduled ministry was two parts: construction and doing feedings. Construction was comprised of working on an addition to the house we were living in, which will be turned into a school. The main work we did on this project was grouting the tile floor.

The feedings was loading food (a soup with protein added) into a van and riding with our host to whatever communities or schools they were visiting that day. When we went to schools, we would do a bible lesson and then teach the kids a few Sunday school songs.

The first day we were there, we all went out together to a school. The kids were so full of JOY. They were all laughing and wanting us to play games with them. Laughing so hard as we tried to learn them. And they LOVED to take selfies with us.

After I went to a few feedings, I started struggling. I wouldn’t wrap my head around what I was seeing. We started going to different communities. I had never seen extreme poverty before. I had never seen families of 6+ living in a tin house that was the size of my parents’ living room. I had never seen kids running up to a van to get food for their family because they couldn’t afford it.

And maybe I should have prefaced this whole post with the fact that prior to departing for the Philippines, I had never left the USA. Not even to Mexico or Canada. Yes: the World Race was the first time I ever truly left “home.”

The remainder of the first week, I stuck to construction because it gave me the opportunity to both still be doing work, but also being able to process things. When I started realizing that I was a long time from being home again, and that everything I’ve known the past years was stripped way–my job, my friends, my family, my church community, my previous ministries I’d been apart of, my dog–everything. This led to what I like to call The Great Identity Crisis of 2018.

Pair that with trying to see the world in a very different lens–one I had never seen before–communities still trying to recover from a typhoon that happened 5 years ago–and you have one emotion mess of a 29 year-old.

If you want to read more on what I specifically walked through month one, I’d suggest reading this post or this post. But I wanted to give an overview of what I saw in the Philippines.

LESSONS: Have compassion. Do the hard things that seem too damn hard to do. Love people. Find your identity in the one true place. Invest in the people around you, especially your teammates. They will be strength when you don’t feel like you have any strength left. Jesus lives in them, and they will pick you up and carry you on the days you feel you can’t move.