Day 1 & 2

Group 1 (Team Toby): Hannah, Courtney, Joshua, Ebony and Toby

WE ARRIVED!!!!! After some very questionable plane food, a stop over in Kuala Lumpur, our very casual stroll through customs and getting our coveted stamp on our new passports we arrived at Manila Airport. The humidity of the Philippines did not hit us as bad as we first expected … it has now. We travelled/ merged/ beeped our way through the city with some of the most amazing driving skills known to man (yet they seem to lose it all when migrating to Australia).  “Uncle Jeff”, the founder of the Yun Jin Ministry Centre, gave us a tour of the local community and we were repeatedly greeted with “Hello, What’s your name” and many high fives by the local children (we want to steal one). By this stage we had been awake for 36 hours straight and still had a trip to the local children’s home, a debrief, a trip to mystery location, aka Starbucks where we spent time making fun at Mr Price’s accent … “CLOOOOOOTHEZZZZZZZZZZZ”.

After some muchly appreciated sleep we awoke at 7 and got straight into work shovelling some very questionable “mud” from the “Pit of Despair”, the 4 meter dive pool that the Rehoboth/ Southern Hills 2011 Trip started and we are hoping to finish this time.

We walked up to the local Children’s home and played with some adorable kids in their amazing cubby house. Meanwhile the Southern Hills students packed the supplies they had bought the night before with the money they had raised by shaving Pastor Pete’s hair off.

Our next construction job was laying a whole heap of concrete that will eventually become a half court basketball court. The cooks provided us with some great meals, including Banana Spring Rolls YUM!

After yummy food we took the supplies Southern Hills had packed to give out to the people at the trash mountain community. Those that where poorest in the community, were given a ticket by the local pastor and were able to collect their supply packs. The living conditions of these people were something that shocked us all and a hot topic at tonight’s debriefing. We all found it heart wrenching when kids, mothers with babies etc, would come up to us begging to a bag of food and we couldn’t give it to them. As we were being led through the maze of houses stacked on top of each other, handing out bags, we came to the end of a meter-wide ally way/drain (sewage run-off), which turned out to be a family’s living room / bedroom / kitchen / bathroom / home. This exposed us new level of poverty that we had not yet experienced.

At the debriefing Mr Price gave a devotion about the “True Vine” and how that relates to us being here.

Tomorrow we’re running a soccer tournament for the extended local community. The day starts at 5:30am, so we’re signing off now. Stay turned for photos and continued updates.

PS We’re sorry for the delay in posting this update. We were experiencing some problems with the internet connection. Thank you for all your comments. We hope we’ve answered most of your queries. Shout outs will start tomorrow. And so will pictures.

PPS To Mrs Nickels we hope the Thermomixing went well :P