The Chance to Do Better

Saturday, October 24, 2009 is now a red letter day in CSC's history. It signifies the end of a nearly four year process to design, fundraise, build, and occupy our new facilities and marks the fourth major expansion of Children's Shelter of Cebu in 30 years of ministry. Yesterday was the day that the Duterte House became the Duterte Home when 35 children moved into its six bedrooms and nursery.

Yesterday was also a day marked by prayers of blessing by our children and staff, hours of excitement as the children moved their things into their rooms, and a fair share of exhaustion by the houseparents and staff. When one walks into the new Duterte Home or the Frankie Wright Medical Center it is evident God has richly blessed CSC through its many friends and supporters. Our additional facilities are new, beautiful, and much better equipped to handle our children with special needs and just more children in general. And in effect, we have enabled our ministry to expand its reach to homeless and neglected children in Cebu by 40%.

After all of work done to build our beautiful new facilities, it's now that the real work begins - taking care of more children with needs that make the difficulties of construction pale by comparison. Now is when CSC has the chance to do more, and to also do it better. The needs are certainly there.In just a week or so, we will begin the process of remodeling our 1992 facilities, the Jackie Cherne Home and the Arman Eicher Home. Although we work very hard to maintain our facilities, 17 years of being filled with dozens of children in an unforgiving humid climate, the foundational buildings of our ministry are needing an overhaul. We will take about two months on each building to bring them up to speed. There is no better opportunity than now when we have an empty building (having just moved the children from the Eicher Home into the new Duterte Home) and the ability to temporarily move children from one house to the other while the remodeling is being done.
In early spring the remodeling should be finished and then we will begin to add to our population by starting to fill the empty Eicher Home. With new houseparents, new childcare workers, and refurbished facilities we will begin the process of doing more for children in need, and doing it better.It was a great day today - one of excitement and celebration. But after four years of hard work by so many people, the really hard work is just only about to begin.

We're Live!

The day that we have long been waiting for has arrived. Early this morning the electric company (VECO) came to install our new transformer, which means that we have the power capacity to fully operate our new, together with our old, facilities. This means that we will be able to push through with our plans to move our children into the new Duterte Home on Saturday. The kids have been so excited anticipating their move that we get pummeled with questions daily about it. Finally we get to give them an answer. Saturday is the big move!

Things We Can't Control

In a sense, one might look at our world and say there is little or nothing we can control. A spiritual person might also say that God is control of everything and it is really up to Him what happens each second of each day. But it is also very logical that people have free will and that God has entrusted us with different talents, gifts, responsibilities, and commitments to fulfill. Now before this gets way too philosophical or theological, I believe (at least from the way I think) that while God is in control of all in the universe, we humans get a lot of discretion in how we run our personal lives, families, businesses, and ministries. We get choices. As individuals or small organizations, we are able to have a lot more input and impact on things on the micro level. On the macro level, however, we're basically a piece of sand on the beach.

Let me digress. As CSC's missionaries and administrative staff, we are several individuals here in Cebu City, or a small organization. Micro level kind of stuff. We work in a situation where we are affected by the U.S. economy, the global economy, and fluctuating currencies. Macro level kind of stuff. One government fiscal policy pulls things one way and another government monetary policy pulls things another way - stuff we've all been affected by. But working in a dual currency ministry we are subject to things we can't control. From January 2008 until September of this year, we watched the dollar recover about 50% of the value it had lost against the Philippine peso during the two years previous to that period (from P56:$1 down toP40.2:$1 and back up to P48.7:$1. Now over the the past few weeks we have watched the dollar slide again to P46.35:$1, a 5% loss. An individual like me or a small organization like ours can't just say to all of those macroeconomic players, "Hey, how about a little more strength for our greenback?" Somebody might hear it, but nobody would listen. There are things we can't control.

And when there are things we can't control, we've only got a couple of choices. We can let it drive us crazy, or we can choose to trust God.

God entrusted this minsitry to us. God gave us the talents to do it. God gave us the great group of loyal friends and supporters to make it happen. And God knows what all of our children's needs and ministry's needs are. I'll choose to trust God. I'm crazy enough already.

A Special Young Lady

This evening we had the joy to celebrate the birthday of one our pre-teens at the Eicher Home. This young lady, Adelyn, who turned 12 today, celebrated her golden birthday. It was her day, her evening, and I think she soaked up all of the happiness she could from her birthday. Adelyn is like that.Adelyn came to the shelter three years ago with her two older brothers and younger sister. To say that life had been very unfair to Adelyn and her siblings would be like saying the sun is hot. It would be quite difficult to describe it all, but in one sense life only just began when they came to our home. There was so much room to grow.

And Adelyn has not stopped. She likes to take it all in, even though it may take her a bit longer when compared to others. But that's okay - at least she has the chance now to take it all in.

We are very proud of Adelyn as we are of her siblings. Given a lot of room to grow, and the opportunity to do so, they have grasped what they've been offered. And Adelyn usually does it with a broad, if sometimes uncertain, smile on her face. She likes to share with others what she's seen, learned, or heard. She loves to ask questions to know more about what's going on in her world, even though she doesn't always grasp the answer quickly. But when she understands, or begins to connect the dots so that things make sense to her, the toothy smile always comes to her face as if to say, "here's another thing that connects us together."

Adelyn's special day today was another event in her life that connected her together with others and let her feeled affirmed and important. It was her day to shine!

Birny the Reader

Often it is just the small things or the simple things that bring a smile to one's face at CSC. Nearly all of the kids that come to our shelter are working with quite a deficit of "world" experience. That deficit may show itself in such ways as an unawareness of anything outside their previous community, not knowing when their birthday is, a lack of knowledge of anything technologically advanced, or zero education, even at an adolescent age. So those of us on the staff get a chance to see a lot of things the kids will marvel at or just begin to gain knowledge of that we probably take for granted.

For Birny, one of those things is reading. And his reading brought a broad smile to my face just yesterday. Academics have been a struggle for Birny since he came to CSC 4 1/2 years ago when he was just shy of his 7th birthday. But each school year his teachers have worked patiently with him and saw him make slow, but fairly steady progress. Any time we received a piece of good news about Birny in the classroom, it was noteworthy.

Much of that good news has been due to a lot of special efforts on Birny's behalf to help him in the areas he struggled in, primarily reading. Birny has spent many an hour over the past four years benifitting from one-on-one instruction (or II, as we call it here), which brings us to this week.

When Teacher Shari (our school consultant Shari Reasoner) is here in Cebu during one of her four or five month-long stints each year, she will take special time to work with some of our students who need a little extra help. A few times each week Birny will get to come into the library, put on a special "reading" t-shirt, and proceed to do some fun reading with Teacher Shari. He loves it, looks forward to it, does it with a lot of enthusiasm, and gets a great boost to his self-image. Having had a love for reading and books myself since my childhood, I get a lot of joy out of hearing a young reader enjoy a book and read it with passion and eagerness. Way to go Birny (and Teacher Shari)!

Encore!

Poise is the first word that comes to mind. I think we began having recitals at our school about nine years ago, but this is now the second year that we have had a formal recital and dinner. Eight of the kids from our shelter were involved in the performances and they practiced hard in preparation, dressed sharply, and played very well despite their nervousness. They were definitely poised.

Jeneviev, Analiza, Riza Mae, Bernardo, Jenive, Leheca, Paula, and Charryto were the performers and Teacher Francis had worked long hours over many months to help them hone their skills. It is a blessing to see the talents God has given our children and how they use them to bless others and bring glory to God. But it doesn't come easily. It takes the wonderful talent of Teacher Francis and his enthusiasm to help draw the talents out of the kids. And then it takes hours and hours of hard work by the kids to perfect their keystrokes on the piano, their touch on the clarinet and flute, and the ability to draw the bow across the strings of the violin.

We had a great crowd of special friends that came to see the kids perform last night. Since our kids come from very difficult situations and do not have their parents to see them perform, we are very appreciative of our close friends in Cebu who have become our kids "extended family." We were all very proud of the way all of our kids strove to excel, playing their pieces confidently, and quickly composing themselves if they played a wrong note. I think we learn a lot more about our kids, and they about themselves, when they make a mistake, make the needed adjustment, and go on to finish strong.

Our kids, from the beginning to the end, performed fantastically last night. And they certainly finished strong!

In the Middle of the Action

When our family returned to Cebu in June from a one year furlough in Washington and Minnesota, we came back one member short. We left our older son, Anthony, there to begin college in St. Paul. Ruth and I always knew that day would come, but we didn't really realize how it would come rushing up on us. I suppose most parents feel that way. But his 17 1/2 years of living in our home, most of that time here in Cebu where he was born, didn't seem long enough considering the thousands of miles and one very big ocean away that we would be. There was still too much to do and so much to impart. I suppose again that most parents feel that way - the thoughts kept drifting in that we should have done this or we should have done that. But then again he probably wouldn't have been able to leave home until he was in his 50s if we would have done all the things I thought of. We enjoyed all of our time with Anthony as a child in our home, but we raised him to be an adult. Now he is and he's getting along just fine (and many heartfelt thanks to many wonderful friends of ours who are a great extended family to him). We are very proud of him and the choices he is making.
It has also been Anthony's dream for some time to be an officer in the Marine Corps. He has long had a desire to serve the United States of America and it's causes for freedom. And even as a young boy the attack on our country on 9/11 seemed to have a profound effect on him. Perhaps being a resident of the Philippines where freedoms and justice are far less concrete gave him a desire to be a part of a cause where they are. But with that all said, he watched one idea about how he wanted to become Marine Corps officer fade and then saw another get clearer.

He Skyped us in the middle of August and said he would like to enlist.

It would get quite lengthy to go through all of the details of the past 6 weeks, but it would be saying enough that we wanted to make sure he knew what he was getting into. With his own initiative and the help of good friends he seems to be well informed and with the right motivations. And he still has the goal of being an officer - an infantry officer. So a parent, at this point, has to ask. Why? Why not choose something a little bit safer (what is safer in the Marines)? Now all of that may come to pass, or it may not. There are a lot of hurdles between signing your name on the dotted line as an enlisted personnel to becoming any kind of officer in the Marine Corps. But his answer? He wants to be challenged and to make a difference where the action is. Somebody has to do that job.

Where does he learn this stuff???

I had to reflect a bit on what Anthony has been exposed to his entire life. He has lived among a group of people (his parents included) who, in a country far away, have been working to make a difference in other people's lives. There are certainly some who would say we are maybe a bit touched to live halfway around the world in sometimes very difficult conditions to help Filipino children. And those people may be right. But when you know you are in a work God has ordained and you see the way your efforts result in changed lives, you know you are doing the right thing.

The situations that most of our children at CSC come out of are desperate, if not sometimes horrific. And while some children may continue to face challenges as they move beyond CSC to adoptive families, by and large they are doing well. Through several means, we maintain contact with many dozens of our former kids and their adoptive families to see them be successful in school, maintain a healthy spiritual life, get productive jobs, and start families of their own. Those success stories would not have happened without a dedicated group of people here in Cebu in the middle of the action, doing the work that few others choose to do.

Somebody has to do this job.