Bohol, Philippines Youth Mission Trip

These next few months will for sure be the most eventful few months of my life all leading up to my departure to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia where I will spend the remainder of the fall.  For memory sake I wanted to capture a brief snapshot of each trip.

Bohol, Philippines Youth Mission Trip

June 30th - July 5th

This spring our youth group decided to raise money for a preschool in the Philippines.  When I figured out that only 45,000 HKD, around 6,000 USD, could provide a teacher, a teacher's aid, school uniforms and supplies, lunch every day, and a livelihood program for 30 preschools and their parents for 1 school year- I couldn't help but get excited.  Union U'th decided to take half of our funds raised at our annual 30 Hour Famine and donate to this cause.  In accordance with this, we thought it would be a fantastic opportunity to then take students down to visit and tangibly experience what they raised money for.  We spent the first week of July visiting our preschool and serving the island of Bohol.  Our group split up into two groups; one group worked at a church, building a wall for an addition and the other worked to construct a toilet for a church (shown below).  My group worked on the toilet where we arrived to a hole in the group that would serve as a septic tank which had been dug for us.  This small rural church had been waiting for funding to complete the project for almost 4 months.  Over the week my group completed about 3/4 of the project and had a blast.  We had to ride around an hour each way to get to the church where we were working but we joyfully enjoyed the Jeepney ride where we got to journey on the top after we got out of town.  The students truly seemed to experience God's grace though service and our devotion times were very powerful.