Day Three: Soccer Tournament

Another 7am rise and shine, to a once again phenomenal brekkie cooked by Marilou. With most of the team excited for the day’s activity being an all day soccer carnival, we once again crammed 23 people into 2 cars. Luckily the sardine ride didn’t last for long. Once we arrived at Faith Academy, it was such a blessing to see the excitement on these kid’s faces and the unity brought by our shared love of sport that bridged the language barrier.

The 2nd Annual Rehoboth Christian College Soccer Tournament was played from 9:30am until 4pm. With three divisions: 6 teams of Boys under 12’s, 10 teams of Boys under 17’s and 5 teams of Girls under 17’s, we all played and round robin on a full soccer pitch, divided into three. Rehoboth had a team in the Boys under 17’s and the girls under 17’s.

The day consisted of the boys doing good as usual, and the girls blowing everyone’s mind, with actually playing in the Grand Final and placing second.  The first, second and third placing for each division of the competition each received a trophy and a soccer ball, so our girl’s team asked the winning team, La Salle, to sign their ball and our girls signed a ball and they exchanged them. We felt like sports stars as many of the team wanted photos with us and to get us to sign their soccer ball.

The referees challenged our boys to a scratch match at the end of the tournament. The game was hotly contested with the referees taking out the match by two goals.

While the day consisted of many blessings, such as minimal injuries, beautiful weather, and the chance to increase our companionship and understanding of the Filipino people, we faced some challenges and difficulties such as; teams rocking up late, teams not rocking up late (because they didn’t rock up at all) and having to turn away some teams as they didn’t have a formal coach or any pesos to register. Some creative and quick rescheduling was needed, without a printer, we had to write everything out by hand for each of the 21 teams.

After such a physically taxing day we spend the night relaxing by the pool, going down the slide, and jumping off the diving platform.  Miss Smoker surprised us with Yellow Cab pizza and a coke for supper.

The Smurf family is super keen for some more construction tomorrow, and all the blessings and challenges it will bring.

Today’s blog was brought to you, by the Smurf family (the blue team)

Papa Smurf – Josh

Mama Smurf – Emily

Dumpling Smurf- Cassia

Pop Tart Smurf  - Tyler

Sausage Smurf – Jesse Stafford

Smurfette – Becky

Daily Motto: “You only live once, so go nuts…” – Abraham Lincoln

Day Two: Mixing it Up

Today we all worked hard. We built a house, or what felt like a house. We prepare for and poured a concrete floored slabs for the second story floor,first storey room, of two houses within the community of Cuatro (just across from the Children's home). The girls did the back breaking work of spinning the wire to reinforce the slap, before we began mixing the concrete. The boys laboured, doing muscly stuff to get the move bags of sand, blue metal gravel and concrete down an uneven dirt path of 60m which was slippery and sludgy due to rain. In the end we realised lots of the girls are stronger than the boys.

 We rotated in our three groups, with two doing the construction while the other team got to slack off (not really, it was actually intense) with the kids from the children's home, playing soccer, blowing bubbles, giving piggy back rides and going up to the nursery to cuddle and look after the toddlers.A break for lunch meant more of Marilou and the other wonderful ladies in the kitchen's deliciously scrumptiously fabulous lunch, which "was better than any if my Mum's cooking ever - Jesse Pleysier", although I am sure he meant no offence to his mum.

After a short rest, we continued construction while one of the team took the Children's Home kids to the pool for a swim. With only one pour left to finish the slaps the Red and Blue team dug in for their 4th hour on construction, to finish the job. It gave us so much satisfaction to look at the final slab when we had finished.

With the work completed we came back to the YMC to shower and some jump in the pool (from the 3rd storey) and enjoyed the new slide into the pool. It was lots of super duper fun. Dinner... Dinner was was like no other - hallelujah - it was amazingly good especially the much loved sweet bread. If you hadn't got it already, we are loving the food!!!

After dinner we managed to get through the crazy Filipino traffic with Smoke Dog (Miss Smoker) and Ryallsies (Mr Ryall) top notch driving. We went to TayTay, which is the local mall and each team was given 500 pesos (approx $12) to buy snacks for merienda (morning and afternoon tea) for the whole team for 3 days. The red group (who are writing this blog) got the best food which is a box full (approx 10 litres) of super awesome cookies and some MARTYs crackling, this stuff is the best.

After finishing off the night with some well deserved Starbucks, we piled back into the car only to realise that one of the cars would not start, Oh dear!! While Miss Smoker and Mr Ryall was trying to sort out how to get things going, Mini Staffy (Jesse Stafford) and Josh prayed over the cars engine. Jesse managed to touch the hot radiator hose and he was laying hands on the car, however quick reflexed ensure no damage. In short, after a lot of stress talking to the shopping centre security we eventually go home by piling 22 of the team into a 15 seater van. With some prayer and a bit of singing we managed to work hard, fight through the stress and be happy.

Today was awesome. So long farewell, we hate to say goodbye...
PS Sorry Mrs Erispe
PPS Cathy and Miss Smoker edited this
PPPS The weather was rainy and hot and muggy

Day One: Travel Day

Well day one is here! We met at Perth international airport on Thursday night, said our ‘tearful’ goodbyes and headed on through to customs. After the extraction of a few water bottles and a screwdriver we were free to go through to the departure lounge. There we saw the kids from Kennedy Baptist College who were taking a different flight through Singapore but were bound for the same destination as us. After listening to a few creative interpretations of passenger names over the loud speaker our flight was finally called and we boarded.

The six-hour flight went by quick for some, and slow for others (Tyler) who discovered their inflight entertainment was defective. We landed safely at Kuala Lumpur and after a pre trip briefing and a quick journal session we boarded the next flight to Manila. Again, the flight went by slow for some and fast for others (Jos and Stringer) who entertained themselves by putting as many M&M’s as possible in sleeping junior Stafford’s nose, ears and mouth.

We landed in Manila around 2:30pm and, after waiting for the bus for half an hour continued on the supposedly one hour drive to the Ministry Centre. Four hours later and an added bonus of the Kennedy team we arrived at the Ministry Centre hot, tired and hungry. After a delicious dinner of lasagna and sweet bread, we went for a tour of the ministry centre and discovered a 3m long reticulated python. Then we unpacked our bags and rearranged and categorised the donations given by the Rehoboth Community. This was followed up by a quick swim for some, devotions and bed. Thus endeth day one.

Donation collected through the shopping list initiative
for the Philippines Mission Trip 2014