Cockroaches, Carabao, and Bicol!

I am really lacking in my blog posts. Sorry! I was in Bicol for 10 days so that is my excuse. Well, in Bicol we did some amazing stuff! I will try to summarize it because I don't have much time. Basically, we were there to develop more partners in our for our RedHAT team. Red is the international colour for AIDS and HAT stands for HIV AIDS Team. It is the organization that we go around with to all the schools and stuff. So while in Bicol we did two presentations for various church pastors and leaders in which we were equipping them with information and stuff about HIV and AIDS. RedHAT is going to be partnering with some of them...people from our team (not us North Americans) will be going back in October to lead another training seminar for them. We did one school seminar for 3rd and 4th year high schoolers in which we only had one hour to do it when usually we do it in 90 minutes. It was pretty crazy that we finished in our allotted time! On another day, one of our seminars got moved to the evening of the next day so we prayed about what we should do, and then we stopped randomly at this national high school and asked the principal if we could come back the next day and he said sure! It was pretty crazy actually that he let us because for all the schools in Laguna that we presented at when we were here a few weeks ago were such a hassle for us to go to. We had to get letters signed by like the mayors and then the principals and stuff like that. So we came back the next day and did a 2 hour and 15 minute seminar for 140 4th year high school students!! It was the most we've ever had and it was so great. It was difficult because when we did the stations part, we usually just have around 10 kids in each group, but this time we had close to 30 in each separate group at the 5 stations, so it was pretty nuts. But we did it! We also did a presentation for college-aged students which went really well too and some of them want to join RedHAT when the team goes back in October and we had some really good discussions with them also.

I'll just talk about some other things we did in Bicol! When you go to a new city, you usually should make a "courtesy call" to the mayor, so we did that when we got to Legazpi City which is a pretty big city in Bicol. It is on the list for one of the places that an HIV/AIDS epidemic is likely to happen because there are a lot of illegal sex businesses there. So we went to visit the mayor, but he wasn't there so we just met with the next highest guy and then went on our way. Later in the evening, we got a call from the mayor saying he wanted to meet with us in the morning which apparently never happens according to Ate Myra, one of our guide people. So we went back and we met with the mayor for almost an hour I think and also with the Officer of Health of the city who has been really promoting HIV/AIDS awareness. Ate Myra said this was just incredible that we had the opportunity to talk with the mayor and the health official about what we were doing because that never happens apparently. Courtesy calls are just like ten minute things! So that was pretty amazing.

We went to another city called Naga City and our guide there was Ate Aisha. She organized so many great things for us to do on a day off! We planted rice in rice fields which is pretty nuts. Rice fields are like filled with water and you sink in the hot mud and water almost to your knees then are bending over and shoving these little rice plants in the ground. It's pretty hard work. We also rode a carabao! You can google image search a carabao to see what that looks like. Eric fell off it! It is hard to ride because the skin is really loose so you move around a lot. We also climbed a pili tree. We went to a black sand beach on the Pacific Ocean which was cool. It was the first time I've been in salt water. We also went fishing on a freshwater lake for tilapia which was really fun. We rode a boat to the middle of the lake to this fishing hut that is floating and then rode a smaller boat to one of the nets which was holding 5000 fish! Then you catch them with your hands out of the net. Nicole and I were very brave and held the fish haha. We also asked the fisherman how he killed them and he showed us. After that, we tried to kill one also by bopping it on the head like he did but it didn't work and only caused him to laugh at us.

Another amazing thing in Bicol was when we visited a tribal community way in the middle of nowhere sort of. It was really cool! Ate Aisha works with this particular tribe and they sang us a song in their language which BA was translating for me, and their singing was incredible. I think it was my favorite part of the whole trip. It moved me to tears, it was so good. It was awesome to see how God can reach the most remote people groups and they have such great faith. They gave us a lot of fruit to take home as a gift.

Another thing I did was pick pineapple! I was the only one in the group that did it. I think they basically let me because I talked to one Filipino man and he didn't understand English and I was asking him if he lived in the place that we were, so I was like "is this your bahay?" which means house in English and they were all laughing at me and then he let me pick a pineapple haha!

Another crazy thing was that we were hiking in this jungle area and this huge thunderstorm hit and we were there in the middle of the jungle! And I had the only umbrella! The others had gone ahead, so Lisa, Nicole, and I were huddled under this little umbrella getting soaked to the skin. It was horrible. Rains here are nuts...and the thunder and lightning was very very close. We screamed everytime there was thunder because it was so incredibly loud and close to us. I almost burst into tears at one point. Quite terrifying. But we were ok! Eric eventually came down the mountainous jungle and told us there was shelter a big farther up so we ran up there in the mud and pouring rain and thunder and lightning...it was like an Indiana Jones movie.

Ok, last thing and then I have to go! On Thursday night of this week, we started the long drive back to Laguna. We left around 10:30 after our last seminar and drove until about 2:30 a.m. when we were just exhausted so we stopped at this kind of sketchy hotel place. So we get in there, and Nicole is brushing her teeth then runs out of the bathroom (the rooms are really really small, so not really runs...) and is like "ahh there's a cockroach in there" so then we just stay out of the bathroom haha. But then we were kind of scared and we had been sleeping with three of us in a double bed the whole week (Lisa, Nicole, and I) because there were never enough beds, so we decided to push our beds together. When we moved Nicole's, there were two cockroaches sitting there! So there was a lot of screaming and Lisa grabbed my sandal and killed one and Nicole swept it out the door, but the other got away. We then sprayed bug spray all over the room and made a bug spray perimeter around our beds that were pushed together then went to sleep haha. It was quite an adventure! Definitely our most memorable hotel...three in the morning and fighting the cockroaches!

Anyway, Nicole and I are going to go to LBCRC now for awhile to hang out with some youth and then we are going to Calamba later to hang out with other people. Should be fun. We are doing presentations this week at Los Banos National High School which is a HUGE school so that should be interesting. There is lots of H1N1 in LB right now though so lots of schools are shut down. We'll see what happens!