The weeks are really flying by. We have been here for 5 weeks already! It hardly seems possible! Last Sunday, after going to church in Makati, we really wanted to find a peaceful lovely spot to relax in for a bit. Our apartment, with its noisy air conditioners isn’t quite that. We saw on the map that there were some small parks in the Makati area, which is quite nice, but there were too many cars, no place to park, etc. So we found ourselves back to the American Cemetery. I love this place so much. There was hardly anyone there, and we were able to go into the museum there. The museum does a very nice job of portraying the role of the Philippines in WWII and lives of both Americans and Filipinos who sacrificed their lives. I couldn’t help but think of my Dad who served here during WWII and had the job of tagging and identifying the dead.

Visit to Tondo/Smoky Mountain

On Wednesday, we had an appointment to go and do our fingerprinting at the immigration office, since we missed the fingerprinting event at the area office. We had a driver pick us up who, with her husband, owns a transporting business and transports missionaries a lot. She was fantastic! We ended up spending the entire day with her. I was envisioning having to wait around for an hour or two at the immigration office, but not so! They have it very well organized. Another church employee went in with all our paperwork, while Sharon, our driver, took us around to a couple of historic churches in Manila. Then, when it was time to go in, we only waited for about 10 minutes. We had mentioned that we wanted to go to Tondo, which is a well known area of extreme poverty in Manila. We had heard of a great humanitarian project called the Purple School and Purple Foundation. She took us around in her big van and asked everyone where we might find this place. We finally found it, but it has changed and is now called The Tondo Community Initiative. You may have heard of Smoky Mountain. This was a huge landfill consisting of over 2 million tons of waste. The flammable substances on the decomposing waste led to fires and resulted in many deaths. People lived here, with families, and even the children would be set to work sorting and collecting garbage. Well, it was officially closed in 1995 and was turned into public housing for the residents. We had a good visit with the director of the Tondo Foundation and we are hoping to find some worthwhile projects to really help the residents there. Since the van couldn’t make it through all the narrow alleys, we hired a tricycle to take us through the area. The kids were so precious.