New Year's Update!

Happy New Year!

I hope you each had a great Christmas and New Years celebration with friends and family.

The Christmas season here was a really neat time. Our little community of families got together and did a number of traditional “Christmas-y” things, and then some that are not so traditional. The whole week before Christmas we got together and watched a Christmas movie each night, at Scott and Vicki’s house. I baked Christmas cookies for the most part of a day, a few days before Christmas, and we played Christmas music the whole time. =) With all of that, I didn’t mind too much being far away from my family, and I enjoyed having a warm, sunny Christmas.

On Christmas Eve, Steve and Jessica planned an outreach to one of the Mangyan (mon-yan) tribes that is nearby. The Mangyan people are the indigenous people of the island of Mindoro, and they are further broken down into smaller tribes. They are very marginalized, poor people, who have traditionally not owned any land, but they live off the land, and move around frequently. You can tell who the Mangyans are easily, because they are smaller in stature than other Filipinos, they tend to have curlier hair, and rounder faces, and they are almost always poorly dressed and frequently dirty. They are dear people though, from the interactions I have had with them, but are painfully shy around us foreigners. We hope to be able to get to know some of them, and offer them free maternity care, because the majority of Mangyan mothers give birth at home with no one attending the birth but their husbands. So far we have had a few of them from the community up the road, coming for prenatal check ups.

For the outreach we packed bags of food for each family in the village. Each had rice and canned meats and some noodles, and a some fresh pork they could cook for their Christmas celebration. Steve and Jessica had worked with Pastor Toto who with his family, pastors a church right up the road. He has a real heart for reaching out to the Mangyans and a number of them attend his church. They bought 450 pairs of flip flops to give to the kids, and a toy for each child, as well as an apple, which is a special treats for Christmas time here.

Here is Pastor Toto, Steve in the background, and Sarah.
On Christmas Eve we drove up to the village, which is about 20 minutes away, and started to organize things to be able to hand them out to everyone.

This picture is of the kids lining up to get a toy and an apple.
I was helping with fitting the pairs of shoes on the kids…it was a bit chaotic….=) The kids all lined up well, but then somehow the line got tighter and tighter, and there was less and less room for me to work in.

It was a neat time though, and we all came back really glad that we had done it. It was a lot of fun. We gave away all of the shoes, and each family got a bag.
After, we went back and had a Christmas Eve service at Scott and Vicki’s and sang Christmas carols really loud on their front porch. There were probably about 30 of us, so it sounded pretty good. =)

Christmas morning a few of us got together at Corin and Joyce’s house, who are a young married couple, and we had a big breakfast and got each other some stocking stuffers. That afternoon everyone with Mercy In Action got together again, and had a big Christmas dinner, and then did a gift exchange. It was a good time, with good friends.

Even the cat had a good time
Thank you for your prayers for electricity!! Two weeks to the day after the typhoon hit, we had power back in our houses. We were all so thankful! I don’t think I take it for granted quite as much now. =)

The week before Christmas all of the medics and children in crisis students finished their outreach and graduated, and headed back home for Christmas. The next three weeks or so, I will spend getting ready for the new class of midwives to arrive and start their clinical training.

You can continue to pray for our relationship with the local Filipina midwives who are here. They are wonderful ladies, and we are walking through how we can support them, and begin our own birth practice.

Prayer Points
• Safety as members of our team travel- Vicki was on a small ferry boat about three weeks ago, that sank in stormy waters as she was crossing from Puerto Galera, to Luzon, to go to Manila. She’s fine, and everyone on the boat was okay, but it was really scary and we are glad she is okay!
• Good relationships with Filipinos, our neighbors, friends, and patients
• Wisdom as we get ready for the new midwives to arrive

Thank you!
Much Love,
Becka

Thanksgiving

So, about a week before the typhoon hit, we were able to have an absolutely lovely Thanksgiving day here. We were able to get two turkeys, Scott carried them over from Batangas.

So, we had turkeys, and then we ordered some barbequed chickens too, since we weren't sure if the turkeys would be enough...there were going to be about 30 of us.

We also were able to have stuffing, mashed potatoes, and cranberry jelly, straight from the can. =) We had green beans, and carrots, and of course gravy, and it was so good!

I made pumpkin pie from the local orange squash here which turned out great, and Shawn and Jenna made their Sour Cream Dutch Apple pie recipe.

I've put in a few pictures of it...because I've found it saves me time, and a picture tells so much! We didn't get a group picture, but afterwards I thought about how that would have been fun...oh well. Next time na lang.

Vic and I had just taken the meat off of one turkey. Here are Terri and Irie...we were trying to make some whipped cream by hand. We had this box of super-pasturized UHT whipping cream, so we added a little sugar, and set to stirring with a whisk...well, we'd been stirring for a bit, taking turns, and all of the sudden the cream starts getting lumpy, so we keep stirring, and then...it turned into butter. All of the solids clumped together at the top, and the skim milk was at the bottom. We had a good laugh about that...our super whipping powers...hehe. We actually used the butter to make a couple of different batches of cookies, that turned out great.
Here is Curt "carving" the turkey. He actually posed for this one with the knife in his hand, because he was mostly picking the meat off with his fingers....
Of course we had the "kids table". =) All the kids ate outside.
And yes, we have been going to births too...here is a picture of one we went to a couple of weeks ago. She was a first time mom, so it was a long labor, but all went really well.

Typhoon Durian

Well, we all survived the typhoon, with relatively little damage.

It hit hard though, and tore up lots and lots of trees, and tore off roofs. It really hit about maybe 11pm, and I'd been sleeping for a while, so I woke up, and closed my windows and watched the wind and rain whip around outside. I was up and looking around every couple of hours, and I dosed inbetween that. Finally about 4 am it quieted down a bit, and I woke up at 6:30 to see my neighbors repairing their torn off roof.

There wasn't a whole of of structural damage to things, besides for the trees torn up, but the sad part is the loss of electricity. We are hearing reports that it may be 1-3 MONTHS before the electricity is back up. That sounds so crazy, I can hardly comprehend it. But if you think about it the electric lines run along the road, and there must be thousands of trees down along the stretch of national highway that goes from here to Calapan, the big city on northern Mindoro.

So, my last post about waiting for electricity for my house is somewhat null...maybe when power is finally restored, my place will be included. =)

So, for now I'm good. I was at a labor/birth for about 18 hours yesterday, so I'm a bit tired. I did rest some during that time, but it's still not ever relaxing. There was a shoulder dystocia, so that was exciting, but everything was fine, and the baby responded well right away.

Thankfully we have a generator at Scott and Vicki's, so amazingly the internet is running by that, and I can charge my phone, so I'm able to communicate with people. =)
A lot of people in White Beach have generators also, but not really so much here in Aninuan, which is about a 10 minute walk away. So we'll see, we may be living by generator for the next while.

It's okay though, and life seems to be going along as usual...except for the trees in the middle of the road