Karaoke

It's about time to post about something that is SO common here in the Philippines: KARAOKE!! A couple days ago, we went to K-1, a coffee shop with....karaoke rooms for Jenna's birthday.

Jenna loves karaoke and is aMaZInG at getting everyone else excited about it too.

Great fun...really loud, disco lights, lots of singing off-key.......perfect karaoke.


Lois' continuity, Celeste, came with her baby who was born at Mercy.

What's a good karaoke party without the YMCA song??? :D

Good times...

Night Shift

Hooray for night shifts! And fantabulous supervisors!! We're going to miss you Ate Elai. :(

Next to the what?!

Only in midwifery school...a conversation I had recently:

Me: Does anyone know where the book Holistic Midwifery Care During Labor and Birth, Volume II is?
Another Student: Ummmmmm, I think it's on the bookshelf.....next to the pelvis.

Outreach to the Bukid

Ok, outreach. There's so much to tell! Well, basically, it was great. We cleaned some boils, gave prenatal care, played with a ton of kids, ate rice at *every single* meal, killed a mouse that was in that rice, washed our hair in the rivers every day, nearly lost my voice when a cockroach dropped down my shirt, rode motorcycles for hours almost every day, saw plenty of gorgeous scenery, worked on Bisaya, learned some Minobo, and prayed...a lot.


Here we have the three girls from Mercy: Janelle, me, Charity

Our first night was spent at Ate Mary Jane's house. A midwife in some of the rural villages in the mountains, she was originally going to be the one who escorted us through the area. Sadly though, she miscarried the week before and needed to stay home. However, she was an amazing hostess, and we loved meeting her family. Her testimony, heart for God, and love for her people are incredible.

This is Ghang-Ghang, also a midwife who grew up in the area but now lives in Davao. She graciously took us to the villages instead of Mary Jane.

The pump outside of Mary Jane's house where most of the village gets their water and takes their baths.

All morning and evening, the young kids carry water from the pump to their homes (yikes! and I thought sweeping the floor was a horrible enough chore as a kid...)

Ready to head out...(this was the easiest day riding because we had an extra motorcyle)

"THEN the 'All Natural' coconut is shredded, packaged, and shipped to you." :P

Ummmm.......a little girl :D

We spent the next two days at a clinic just a 1.5 hours ride away from Mary Jane's house.

This little guy spent hours reading Where There is No Doctor. He has the same fascination I had with this book when I was his age...

Inday loved the stethoscope, and when any of the other kids tried to use it, she would very seriously say, "Okay, ooookay, share, SHARE." Really cute....

We started out with just a few kids...

And got more....

And more. And later we had many, many more, but at that point, it was too dangerous to pull out my camera because...

It became almost a frenzy with them trying to get in the photos. :P





Devotions

We were SO thankful for mosquito nets every night...

And plenty of young coconut!

The person taking this picture was just waiting for me to slip and fall in the mud again. :D This is where we washed our clothes and dishes.

These girls took us for a very long walk to see their village.

Rice fields

One of the rivers we swam in every day.

Hair washing party

Third village where we worked; we only stayed here for half a day. The prenatal room was sort of missing a wall... :D

Yes...there were people staring in from all sides the entire time. And we had about three people trying to translate our ridiculously horrible Bisaya into Minobo for each patient. It made for a lot of laughter.



Through each day, we remembered something Ate Mary Jane had told us on the first day at her house. "In over ten years of doing midwifery, I have never lost a baby or a mother during labor, delivery, or immediate postpartum. And I have nothing, no resources--no medicine to stop bleeding, no oxygen to help a baby breathe after birth. At least, it *seems* like I have nothing, but really, I have the most important thing: God. When a woman is bleeding to death, I pray. When a baby won't breathe, I pray. And God has blessed my job. He knows how difficult it is; He hears my prayers. And so, I continue."

Praise the LORD, all nations! Extol Him, all peoples! For great is His love toward us, and the faithfulness of the LORD endures forever. Praise the LORD!
~Psalm 117

Conquest of the World... and Dirty Laundry

All week I avoided the laundry room. As the bathroom is connected to the laundry room, it was extremely difficult. Still, I tried not to notice the monstrous pile of laundry erupting into Mount Everest size. Since mom had just had Josiah, another baby brother, I was in charge of making sure that each day Dad had a clean shirt to wear to work and all the other homeschooling kids didn't look like a bunch of dirty orphans. My job was simple. Vini. Vidi. Vici. ( I came. I saw. I conquered.) But Julius Caesar had it easy. He only needed to conquer the whole world; I needed to conquer an ever evolving heap of laundry.

But each time I strode into the room to wrestle t-shirts into the washer and subdue dirty towels, I remembered that I was not the first to battle laundry. Like Julius Caesar wasn't the first to grapple with the globe, I was not the first to try my wit against laundry; Mom had done it for years before me. She had manipulated laundry long before the day I was born. Even when other circumstances impeded her efforts, she always managed to crack down on the laundry before it overwhelmed her.

In those dark moments when I struggled with the laundry, I esteemed her as a heroine. Even so, just the remembrance of a great super mom was not going to aid my spunk. In other words, simply attempting to conquer the laundry as Mom had done was not going to promote my efforts. First I needed the character it takes to cope with laundry. I needed commitment and perseverance, and only looking at the goal and ignoring the means was a sure path to failure. As we try to attain the accomplishments of our predecessors, we need to first become the person they were before we can do the things they did.

Trying to achieve our ends with this dogmatic approach is very intimidating. Kevin Smith understood this when he remarked, "More often than not, a hero's most epic battle is the one you never see; it's the battle that goes on within him or herself." Before we secure our accomplishments, we must fight where the battle is fiercest, within ourselves. The fruits of our effort will only be an afterthought of this struggle.

Prior to surmounting our nemesis, we first must conquer ourselves. Julius Caesar was not a conqueror when he subjugated the neighboring lands. On the contrary, he became a conqueror when his character defined him as some jockey who thought he could seize the world. Our accomplishments flow from who we really are on the inside.

The writer of Proverbs echoes this idea when he says, "As in water face reflects face, so the heart of man reflects the man." Our actions and accomplishments are an outflow of who we are on the inside. When Jesus chastised the Pharisees in Matthew 12, He said, "How can you speak good, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil." Again, who we are dictates what we will do.

In the end it goes back to the laundry room. How can we be victorious? It begins with a refocus on the real battle on the front lines within our selves. I will never be a successful laundryman if I cannot embrace the qualities it takes to do it. The real enemy isn't the laundry, it's my self. Instead of acting like conquerors let’s be conquerors.

Picture of the Week

This is the cute little guy I babysat for a couple days over semester break... Jeffrey is four months old, was found malnourished and abandoned at the hospital when he was just a few days old, and usually lives at the orphanage (when he's not at Jenn's house).


As a side note, I would really appreciate prayers for the outreach I'm going on early tomorrow morning. I'll be gone 'till late Friday....pictures of that coming up sometime next week... :)