It was a fairly quick night, but we all rested well and are excited to visit our partner church Quest Community Fellowship this morning. The church doesn't have their own building yet so every Saturday night, staff and volunteers head over to their rented building to set up all the different environments so they're ready to go on Sunday morning. Trust me, this is no small task. When we arrived at the church, we got to visit Waumba Land (the environment for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers) and Upstreet (K-5th grade). It was cool to see that we were halfway across the world, but the message and ministries were just the same. It was just another reminder of how BIG our God is!! We then went to the main service and got to worship and hear their pastor Les Tilka speak. Les is originally from Jacksonville, FL. While in college he met a Filipino woman, who he married and now has 3 beautiful children with. They felt led to take their ministry to the Philippines and what an impact they have made there. Before they began the church, they were involved with many other ministries, such as a prison evangelism, child sponsorship program, music ministry-adoration, and Operation Christmas Child. What an amazing family they are!!
 |
| Church members fellowshipping before the service |
 |
| Volunteer reading bible lesson to the kids |
|
Volunteers for Waumba Land
|
Group Picture in front of Quest church |
To begin our trip and to give us some background/familiarity with Cebu City, Les thought it would be fun to have an Amazing Race. Our group divided into 5 different teams. Each group had 2-3 Filipino guides from the church assigned to their team. However, the guides were not able to help much. Thankfully, the people there spoke English. Some of the sights we saw were the Cebu Provincial Capitol, the Tabo-an Public Market, Fuente Osmena Oval, the Taoist Temple, and the Basilica Santo Nino. At each of these main sites, we had certain challenges and questions we needed to answer. Some of the challenges included: riding in a Jeepney, photographing someone peeing on a wall, bartering in the public market, singing karaoke, identifying what all the different colored candles at the Basilica represented, etc. This was such a neat experience. I would definitely say the public market was the biggest culture shock. Here it was not uncommon to see babies and young kids walking around naked or with just a diaper. The young boys walked around with long t-shirts and no underwear. They were all barefoot and the streets were nasty!! I definitely had to hold back some tears after seeing the conditions these people, especially the kids were living in. The smell here was horrendous for a normal person, but being pregnant it was almost unbearable and caused a few gagging moments. In the market, they had dried fish called danghit everywhere. The way they ate this dish was they fried it, added some vinegar, and ate it. Eyeballs were even still intact. Sounds tasty huh?? Wait until you hear what their delicacy is!! We saw some men playing basketball in the public market area. Just beside the goal, there were pig intestines hanging up. They sold pigs in the market and when people bought them, they put it in a cloth bag and carried it away. Our group got to see a young child walk up to the pigs and start peeing on it. Pretty comical! He thought nothing of it. The Filipinos acted as if we were celebrities. They loved having their picture taken and were very friendly. To cap the day off, we had dinner at this outdoor BBQ place. Here they served chicken and pork on a stick, wrapped their steamed rice in bamboo, and served balut for dessert. Balut is the delicacy I was telling you about. It's a fertilized duck egg with a nearly-developed embryo inside that is boiled and eaten in the shell. As a final challenge to the race, each team could earn bonus points for eating balut. A lot of the students and a few leaders ate it. Gary ate 3 to earn our team extra points. Our team won the Amazing Race and got these awesome t-shirts that said I love Cebu as a prize! Such a fun, but exhausting day. Now off to paint the next 3 days!! Here are a few pictures from what we saw during the Amazing Race. |
0 comments:
Post a Comment