That’s what the people we have met with this week have done! They have risen to the challenge of helping the poor here in the Philippines. And that is our charge to ourselves. We need to try to keep up our energy and do all we can to assist these foundations and just to help where and how we can. We have had the opportunity to have two visits with members of Rise and Rebuild Foundation. What a wonderful work and mission they have! This is an NGO that was started by Ray Goodson. Ray was one of the first four missionaries here in the Philippines. He and his wife, Debra, also served as mission president and wife way back when there were only two missions in the Philippines. She was telling me how challenging it was to do this with young children. Well, fast forward and he is now in his mid 80s and still serving! They have a few farms here and the essence of their organization is that they grow produce and build nutrition centers so they can feed wasted or nearly wasted children. They are targeting young children, ages 3-5. They want to intervene when the children are weaned and beginning their development. Then they move onto children ages 6-12. They train the mothers and teach hygiene as well. They have started to make their own bricks so they can make the nutrition centers more efficient and cost effective. The first pictures are from a week ago when when we went to Tarlac to meet with the Goodsons and the mayor of Tarlac. This mayor is quite the woman as well. She really focuses on what is best for the people. She is quite popular as a result. On Mondays (people’s day) she meets with anyone who wants to come and share their problems or concerns. Sometimes she is busy meeting people until midnight. Well, they had quite the ceremony to honor the Goodsons. They had some videos to show what she has accomplished (kind of self-promoting, actually) then had a video to showcase what Rise and Rebuild has done for the people in Tarlac. Then they presented the Goodsons with a huge poster of them (in much younger days). It was a great meeting, complete with a delicious lunch. We were a bit disappointed the the director of health and superintendent of schools wasn’t there, but we enjoyed our visit to the farm and with the Goodsons. The next pictures show three other members of Rise and Rebuild. Bob Johnson, Sandy Rogers and Kevin Leak were all missionaries here many years ago. Elder Huff had a great time reminiscing with them all. Sandy is here to train workers in nutrition and hygiene. She has done some amazing work with the foundation. Kevin is working on some new innovative methods of producing more yield with the crops. It was a good learning experience for us and a chance to really look at what their future plans are here.

Mushrooms or Books! On Tuesday, all the men humanitarian missionaries went to a mushroom farm about 3 hours south. Long drive to see some mushrooms! The ladies had to stay behind to have a meeting with Fred Hollows Foundation . This is another wonderful foundation who works in more than 25 countries. Their mission is to provide high quality, affordable eye care to those who can’t afford it otherwise. After our meeting, I convinced Kenneth Lee and Jairus Perez (our boss) to take us to the Books for Less warehouse to get books for the literacy program. This is quite the place. They can’t afford to pay their electric bill (Covid hit them hard) so they have most of the books we were able to look at outside on tables. Of course then it started to rain so the books were out there with slightly holy tarps covering the piles and getting a bit wet. It was so sad to think of those books coming over from the US and maybe other countries only to get ruined even more as the rain poured down. We were excited to find cheap books, though. I think these will go to a Stake for their Literacy program. I am still wanting to find a good distributor of books that we can give to the schools. So my quest continues! I am also trying to figure out a way to get some people in the US to donate some books and have someone bring them over. Any ideas, anyone?

Meeting with Stakes– last Sunday, we met up with Kenneth Lee to talk to two different Stakes about the Literacy Program and see if they are interested. The first Stake was the Pasig Stake. This was an amazing group of mostly women. All the ward Relief Society and Primary Presidencies. One thing that was so amazing about this meeting is that these women only found out about the meeting the night before. And just look how many were there! They are so excited to get started with this. They already started coming up with ideas to implement it. Also, the Stake President, President Dy, was in Elder Huff’s marketing class at BYUH. We couldn’t help but think of President McKay’s prophetic promise that students would come to this school (the future BYUH) and would become leaders around the world. So true! The next stake was the East Makati Stake. Our main purpose here was to meet with two doctors from the local hospital who is hoping to work with the church there to plan for future disaster response and to hopefully use our church grounds as an evacuation site and storage area for their disaster supplies. Their hospital sits right on the fault and will most likely become a big sinkhole if there is a big earthquake. Dr. Cordero is such an intelligent and well educated doctor. We went to his hospital today after church and had such a great visit. He got talking about U.S. politics and he knows more about our politics than I do. He even listened to the State of the Union address. It was an amazing visit. We haven’t talked politics for many months. We are excited to get a project started with this hospital. This is the only hospital here that serves the residents of Makati with NO CHARGE!

Ayala Museum

Last but not least…we decided to take a visit to the Ayala Museum since we had to go to Makati to meet the Rise and Rebuild people. So glad we did. What a beautiful museum it was. Four floors and way too much standing. But worth it. Just a few pictures.