Overdue: tacloban, Philippines
BLOG- Basey
I believe it is now time that I write about my time in Tacloban, now 3 months later. Currently I am lying in my tent in Botswana on a rainy Saturday morning and what better thing to do than to reminisce this whole journey as well as record a blog about my time in tacloban way back in the Philippines.
The whole transition after tacloban, to debrief, and then to Africa happened so fast not to mention the lack of wifi at debrief which in turn gave me an excuse not to blog. However, here I am 3 months later regretting my laziness. Therefore, this will be a brief summary of our time in Tacloban. First you must know that from my last blog we were supposed to leave that evening. Unfortunately, yet also fortunately, one of the teams had to be tested for TB, so we were delayed another week of our adventure to Tacloban. (Don’t worry they did not have TB). This gave us an extra week of ministry before peacing out of the Philippines. And what did your beloved daughters do with that week? Well, we made our famous “what the fox say” video which is on YouTube now and other various, random things.
The next day that we were originally supposed to go there came another big storm. So it’s really cool how god used something like that team being tested for TB for the good of our whole squad in order that we wouldn’t be caught in that storm.
Finally that next weekend we headed out for tacloban. Originally we were going for 2 weeks, but because of time we could only go for one week. And boy was it one of my favorite weeks on this trip jammed packed with life. It was about a 23 hour fast and furious bus ride to Tacloban. Our first day there consisted of sitting on the beach(not your white sand pretty beach) but a beach that had just gotten destroyed by a massive typhoon. We waited for our contacts to get things squared away and get groceries. As we waited some of us walked around the place and it was heartbreaking to see that this place was still so destroyed after 3 months of the typhoon happening. Houses in pieces, cars flipped over, clothes everywhere, and signs all over saying “help” or “we are hungry”. We met this one family who graciously invited us into her house that was being rebuilt. She offered us tea and coffee as she shared her story from the storm. I sat amazed at her faith and strength. This was only the first day.
Later that evening we were picked up and taken to a different part of the island called Basey where we spent the rest of our week. Each team (7) were placed with a pastor or pastora to live with and do ministry with across this small yet large area of Basey. Our team was with a lady that we called “mama”. Mama has her own orphanage of about 6 kids that she took in before the storm. She is a pastor of a Pentecostal church and lives in a small 2 bedroom concrete house. All 6 of us, plus mama and 4 kids lived in this house.
Ministry with mama was always an adventure. We never knew what we were getting into. Our main ministry was going to schools to sing songs, give a message(tell/act out a story) and host a feeding for the children. Doing that everyday got quite exhausting to say the least. By the end of it we had songs stuck in our heads and had the story of David and Goliath memorized. In between our times of schools during the day we would visit the surrounding areas that were hit pretty hard. One thing that really blessed me was that in each place we went to visit the people were so generous and welcoming. Despite having all their things destroyed and work gone they still blessed us. In one particular area many of the coconut trees were destroyed which is how most people in that area made a living and yet they fed us coconut water and coconut meat! They were just grateful for us showing up and wanted to bless and thank us with what they did have.
I have several stories from that week, both funny and serious such as cooking, funny things with mama, all the grand adventures we went on, things we ate, the kids in orphanage that we spent time with and captured my heart, visiting the prison, overcoming depression, struggling with and fighting together with Madeline for our friendship and many other things. For now I’ll leave it at this. I would have to write a whole seperate blog for each individual thing I listed above. So, this is my brief summary that doesn’t even scrape the tip of the ice burg of our time in Basey. But man it was one heck of a week that I’ll never forget.
