Wow, it has been a long time since my last blog, sorry about that. Mom and Dad, I'm still okay! I think it's been since we moved into our house, I'm just busy doing other things.
Things are still great here, even better than before. I'm settled in and comfortable here, so much that I've been seriously thinking about coming back again for a while. But it's all in His hands, I'm not worried about what I'll end up doing. God's got it all under control, I'm kind of going along for the ride haha... He'll show me what I'm supposed to do when it's the right time.
Work at the church it going well and I'm making some really wonderful friends. As today is Valentines Day, the church is putting on a bit of a show, where anyone who wants to can grab a partner and sing a love song to God on stage :) Milet and I are going to be singing Only Hope, the song from A Walk To Remember. It's a step out of my comfort zone lol but I'm among friends so I guess I don't have to be too nervous. I'm going to head to the church in a couple hours to practice.
In the last couple weeks I got to do lots of sweet stuff. We had to go renew our passports which is done pretty far away, so after that we went as a team to Divisoria, which is a huge (HUGE) market. Maybe when we have to go back to renew yet again, we can do some more shopping. I only bought some tops. I tried to bring down a pair of shoes to 200 pesos (5ish bucks) but the woman selling them wouldn't agree haha. I should have just bought them since they were nice and really cheap, but I was just too uncomfortable lol I wanted to get out of there. It turns out I'm not a very good bargainer.
Last week Mona and I took Dani to Fresh, the salon near by. I got a foot treatment and pedicure, Dani got a hair treatment, and Mona got a haircut. It's so bizzare in this place haha. There's only two women working in there, the rest are Baclas (cross dressers.) Not only are these men wearing women's clothes, but they even have bras with fake boobs in them and they've got makeup on. Oh, it is so weird. The guy doing my foot treatment actually looked like a woman. Not a very pretty one, but a woman just the same. There's a weird spirit over a lot of men here. Outside of the church they seem to care way more than women about how they look, and you see a lot of Baclas at the mall. Most of the time I don't notice but the guys on the team pick them out pretty easily. Normally I wouldn't go and get salon treatments done, but it's so cheap here it's hard to resist. You can get 4 treatments done for only 500 pesos! That's 11 Canadian dollars! And to get my underarms waxed took like 10 minutes and only cost me 150 pesos, 3 dollars. I'm going to go back to Fresh and get a hair treatment and a facial lol. I had no idea missionaries could enjoy things like this.
Don't think we're not working though! It just happens to be very enjoyable work :) Yesterday at Super Kids I was sitting in the middle of a group of the kids listening to the story or whatever was going on (sometimes its hard to tell because the majority is in Tagalog) and I noticed this little boy behind me laying face down on the ground fast asleep! Some kids were walking around him but he was getting stepped on a little bit and I didn't like seeing the little guy sleeping on the floor like that, so I scooped him up. He was maybe 3 years old and soooo cute. He only opened his eyes for a second and looked at my face, then went right back to sleep in my arms haha. And he stayed there for the next hour and a half. I don't know HOW he slept through all the noise but he did. There's a little girl named Nicole who I held too. She's a little older, probably 4, maybe 5 years old. For the past couple weeks she had a really bad cough, so I prayed for her and this week she was way better :) her eyes were bright and she was giggling and happy.
It's hard to describe what super kids is like when your in the church with 400 kids. There's a shocking amount of violence... most of the boys are just play fighting and wrestling. But it seems like the girls get really scrappy. Dani watched one girl smack a little guy in the face with a dust pan. I saw another girl punching a smaller boy over and over in the face too. Nicole's bigger brother had to come to her defense a few times when she wandered away, because each time, some other kid would push her around or hit her. There's fighting and crying kids everywhere. It's hard to scold anyone because a lot of the time you don't catch what happened, you only see someone crying. You know what happened but what can you do if you don't see it? Not to mention that sometimes you see something happen from across the room and you can't even make your way over there to stop it. There's so many kids, sometimes it feels like a mad house in there. We know that these kids are hitting because its what they see at home. It's hard cause I know there's really not a lot I can do about it except pray and try to step in when and where its possible.
Yesterday we had our first volleyball game of a long tournament. It's a new ministry the church just started to try and get some of the unbelievers who stop by for food involved in the church community. There's a group of boys who come a couple times a week and we'd like to see them get connected with the youth.
I would also like to announce that my good friends We Are The City won the Peak Performance Project in Vancouver! The prize is 150 000 dollars and a huge amount of exposure! I'm so proud to see how far they've come since we were all 14 years old and they were kids practicing their instruments in Cayne's basement. I cried when I found out haha. I only wish I could congratulate them in person and give them all, especially Cayne and Dolby a big hug. But since I can't, maybe you can. They're touring Canada right now so go and find out when their coming to you and go see them for me. If you don't know them already, they're super personable young men, and they'd be happy to meet you. So go shake their hands and tell them Angela misses them and says hi! www.wearethecity.ca
It's almost 3 here and I gotta go grab some lunch and shower. The cold water was hard to get used to at first but now I'm loving it. The key is to shower during the day lol. If I shower first thing in the morning it's too much of a shock for my liking haha.
happy balemtimes everyone, love you!
