Pictures from team Philippines

Baseco. This is our first work site.

Baseco is a town of shacks on a garbabe site. There are more than 900 homes that have been built by habitat, and yet there are still a lot of people living in shacks.

The garbage is so deep in the water you can stand on top of it in some areas.


The kids are digging through the garbage trying to find anything they can sell.






This is Puti. He latched onto us the first day we arrived, and stayed by our side the whole time we were in Baseco. He even helped us when he could.

The Kids

Puti and Mian our little helpers.

Working Hard

Here we have Poyang "working hard"

Korina and I (Jen) are putting up the siding on the Peace center. After a lot of trial and error we finally got a rhythm down.







Holly and Paul are assembling the framing of the Peace center. This by far was the hardest task.

We were able to paint a set of row houses down the road, that the locals had finished building. The color is called Habitat green. Creative I know.






This was the progress of the Peace center when we left on Friday. The working crew will put the roof on, and paint it yellow. For now we are off to another site.

What an encouraging email!

This is an email from a host of one of the camps the Ireland team is working with:

Dear Brandon,

I got your email address from the UPC World Deputation blog that the
Irish team told me about. I hear you are the guy to talk to if I
wanted to send feedback on the UPC students back home ahead of them.

I am on staff at a small Presbyterian church in the suburbs of Dublin
and late in the day, the Presbyterian Church in Ireland got their act
together and let me know in advance that I was getting a team of four
American university students to help me with my 3-Day youth outreach
camps in socially deprived areas of the Irish midlands.

It turns out that these four students, Calvin, Kelly, Trevor and
Camille have been a terrific bonus to our summer ministry at a crucial
time. We were a little worried in advance because PCI had not given us
a lot of forward information. We simply didn't know what to expect
when we went to pick these guys up off the train from Belfast. But
they have been here for a week now and we are just thrilled that they
came, so thank you for sending them.

They had an excellent attitude to all the different roles we dropped
them into- from helping out with our Sunday service to having patience
with the Irish weather as it rained our camps out right through to
mixing brilliantly with our congregation. They were genuine servants
to us. Calvin's energy, Camille's questions, Trevor's sense of humour
and Kelly's maturity shone through over the last few days. Our camps
were not easy jobs for short term missionaries like them but they just
got stuck in and were eager to help out every way they could. It was a
pleasure to work with them.

There was nothing dramatic or sexy about the ministry we were doing
this week but strategically for the development of our little
congregation and over a longer term, for the development of the
Kingdom in Ireland, this kind of day-to-day work is crucial. Your guys
made that work a lot more effective.

Today they moved on into their next assignment with our parent church,
Lucan Presbyterian, where they will be for two weeks. It was great
that I could endorse them so fully to my colleagues down the road.

I hope that all of your Deputation teams are working out so well.
Thank you for running the program. Please pass our gratitude on to the
folks back in Seattle when you get the chance.

Thanks,

Kevin

Grey and rainy

A picture of the Ethiopia team sent by UPC missionary Tim Teusink. He said it was grey and rainy in Addis and they felt right at home!

Ethiopia has arrived!

For those of you who have not heard team Ethiopia has had quite the ride! We showed up at the airport Friday night to shuttle them onto the evening British Air flight to London. Well, come to find out the flight was delayed. It was delayed so much that they were going to miss their flight from London to Addis. Well instead of sending them to London the agent did something else instead, he booked them on the next evenings flight. SO here they were, all packed, all ready, all pumped, but with no place to go! Unfortunately they all went home and slept in their own beds again.
There was a blessing to the whole thing though.
Karla sister was a week over due. Karla was supposed to be in the delivery room when it happened, but obviously wasn't because it didn't happen. Well, guess who had a baby on the night they were delayed! Yep, because of the delay Karla was able to be in the delivery room!
I guess God has a funny way of orchestrating things!
I just got word that they have arrived safely in Ethiopia and will be headed north to Mekelle soon.
Well, I guess in this case they were a day late but not a dollar short. No, they gained from their delay. God was working like He always does, for the good.
In Him,
Brandon

News From Manila

We just finished putting up the siding to the Peace Center we are building in Baseco! Next, we will install the interior walling and start painting later this week. Working in this extremely poor community in Manila has been an enriching experience for all. We not only get to make a tangible addition to their community, but we also get to have an intangible impact on the hearts of the adults and children we encounter.

Recently, a member of Union Church of Manila (UCM), Barry Marshall, has blessed our team by opening his house for us! After a long, hot day working on the church in Baseco, we get the privilege to come home to his house and unwind in his pool and enjoy his companionship over dinner. Barry also hosts a bible study on Saturdays sponsored by UCM called Interface, which invites international students and young adults to join together in fellowship as we learn more about Jesus Christ. Barry is truly a stand up guy!

Another highlight of this trip was when we went to Pastor Steve Ruetschle’s house for dinner. We had so much fun with him and his wife, Michelle, swimming in their pool with their two boys. They served us spaghetti and salad, which was a wonderful slice of home cooking. UCM loves him and I get the impression that some of the parishioners are worried we are here to steal him back to Seattle :) He and Michelle send their love to everyone back in Seattle.

The team is doing very well also. Holly got a stomach bug for a day and Jenn had a cold for a little while, but overall we all are healthy and happy. Surprisingly, the stomach bug has been very dormant, but I think we all are going to peer pressure each other to eat balut (an aborted chicken embryo)—a delicacy in the Philippines—and maybe we’ll be seeing him after that :)

Our caretakers and friends keep us very busy over here, so we will have more adventures to talk about soon! Thank you all for your prayers and thoughts!

Sincerely,

Paul

P.S. The picture is of the Peace Center, before we started to put up siding.

India is seeing ALOT!

hello brandon! here is an update:}

this last week was great! it's crazy how quickly the days fly by. working with the children, as challenging as it is, has been wonderful. i work with the kids daily. because i'm teaching art i have all of the grades at least twice a week. it's a challenge to create lesson plans that will suit such different levels of ability and age. but i've been trucking along. india is beautiful. we went to mysore yesterday to do some sight seeing. just amazing stuff! we visited a few temples which was a very interesting experience, something new to us all. we also saw a HUGE AND GORGEOUS palace. natalie and i kept making up sotries for all of the different rooms, for surely it was right out of a movie! there were few other historic places we visited as well as a huge garden full of water fountains and all. the trip was quite interesting and, here's a funny story, we were like celebs! seriously, it was quite awkward for us but at the garden there were a few groups that could not get enough of us and wanted to take our pictures over and over again. it was wild! the week has been great for us all. jason is teaching a boy who is about to graduate. they are working on economics, which is what jason's degree is in. this boy who's name just happens to be jason wants to go to bible college but has a few subjects to conquer first. other than that jason (our jason:]) is working on various multimedia things for the school, a PowerPoint and a brochure. he's taking a ton of pictures to say the least. carl has become the math teacher. he teaches for the first two periods of the day and then helps jason if he has extra tasks and/or rita if she can manage in her busy day to throw another project our way. rita has more or less given us our duties and said run with it, we have much more freedom than expected. natalie has taken over the office, doing various entering of info into the computer and such. the regular office woman, supadra, just got married and spent this last week on her honeymoon! we attended her wedding reception...talk about culture differences! it was great. this week supadra will be back, and natalie, who is teaching english during first period, will be assigned to something different. i'm hoping she can come help me in the art room! ha. otherwise we're all trucking along so well. natalie and i have begun to have some problems with the food, it's just very different and our apparently sensitive systems are not reacting as well as hoped! also we went full force into it in the beginning, and i think we over did it a bit! haha. we're working on smaller portions. no one is sick yet! we're planning on keeping it this way. next week we will head off to a camp with some of the children, and prem has asked us to preach...yes preach at the english service at the India for Christ Mission church...this we just found out this morning...it should prove to be interesting. thank you all for your support and prayers! sorry to keep this short but i have such limited internet time! much love from India!

First step is EDS...

Our first few days in Fuzine have been pretty busy. We are working in a team of about 10, composed of both Croatians and Americans (Hillary Holman is here, for those of you that know her!) There's a lot to do this week and we've both been working really hard (especially Whitney because her project is pretty demanding). We are getting ready for Economic Diplomacy Seminar (EDS), which is an advanced version of ROM (the reconciliation/leadership conference which is based upon the principles of Jesus). EDS takes the principles of ROM (principles of Jesus) and applies them to economic development, which focuses on issues such as poverty, corruption, unemployment, working across ethnic/religious lines, etc. The conference will run from July 1-15.

I have been helping out with office duties and working on preparing notebooks for the participants. Whitney has been working on decorations with Branja (one of the woman on the ROM team), which has been a huge task. The leadership team arrives tomorrow, so everyone has been really busy (and a bit stressed) trying to get everything done, which has been hard because we've been having lots of computer problems. Once the leadership team, speakers and participants arrive, we will have a full house with around 60 people staying here at Hope House. I

Fuzine (where we are staying) is a pretty small village (the estimated pop. is about 1300, including the surrounding area). But not to worry, it has a bank, post office, general store, pharmacy, fruit store and a few restaurants/cafes/bars and two atms!! There are also two lakes which are great for walking/running around and for fishing, boating and swimming. Apparently this region was a safe place for people of all ethic and religious backgrounds during the wars, so that was why it was chosen for ROM (so all the participants would feel safe, welcome, etc). The coast (Adriatic Sea) is only a half hour drive from here, and we are going to go next weekend during EDS as a day trip.

Overall, I'd say we're doing pretty good and getting excited for the conference to start this sunday!

Prayer Requests:
-that everything will get done in time for the conference (and that the computers will work, visas will arrive, the new photcopy machine will arrive)
-for friendships being made and team dynamics

Thanks!
Karuna

Orientation!!! Belfast Ireland

So Trevor and Camille proceeded to turn around and try to find the pot of gold and leprechaun at the end. They thought they would have better luck with that here in Ireland.

Us in front of the City Hall

Queens University

One of the murals that were created as a result of the troubles

The mile drive up to the Parliment Building

The tour of Belfast

Ok so we are doing some orientation before we go into some intense back to back camps. So here is a bit of what we have seen up to this point. Oh and we just met up with Malia Bushkirk and Laura Huysman, who are interns here from Seattle as well. They are former Ireland Deputees that have come back to work at some of the churches for a year. It was really great to get a different point of view from those that were former deputees and are still here. They had a different insight as to the "troubles" here and the evolution of it in the last couple years due to there involvement.