Flickr back to the Philippines
In 1983, after my sophomore year in college, I went on a summer missions project to the Philippines with Campus Crusade for Christ. I spent two months living in Quezon City and working alongside staffers at Far Eastern University in Manila, evangelizing students with the Four Spiritual Laws and helping to train the students involved in the CCC chapter there.
The project involved about 25 American staff and students, who were split up in teams between Metro Manila, Baguio City, Iloilo, and Cebu. I spent all but a few days in Metro Manila; our team took an R&R break in Baguio City and Bauang, on the South China Sea in La Union province.
The project director was Greg Ganssle. Greg was campus director at Marshall then; he went on to get a Ph.D. in Philosophy and is now involved in something called the Rivendell Institute. I met Greg the previous summer, when he was assistant director of the 1982 Ocean City, New Jersey, summer project. I didn't see much of Greg that summer -- he spent it in Iloilo.
Instead our assigned male staffer was Jon Rittenhouse, then campus director at Michigan Tech. Years later, Jon became the inspiration for a comic strip character. (He was much tamer, although rather uptight, in 1983.) My fellow students were John Parker "Beach" Ward (Marshall), Eric Christiansen, Mary Jane Carlson, and Christina West (Miami of Ohio). There were two staff women from the states assigned to Manila: Norma Valencia from CCC headquarters and Sara (whose last name I forget). Beach Ward and I kept each other sane and laughing that summer.
Some time ago I scanned in some of the slides I took in the Philippines. Tonight I posted them on Flickr, mainly for the benefit of my friend Jenny, who was a psychology student at FEU in 1983. She found me again a couple of years ago, courtesy Google, and she keeps me up to date on Filipino political intrigue. (Helps to keep the Tulsa situation in perspective.)
As a whole, the photos aren't all that representative of the summer; the set is weighted heavily toward special events, like an R&R trip to Baguio City in the mountains, but there are some photos of staff and students at FEU and of the house where we stayed and the Crusade staff trainees that we shared it with.
Click the coconut warning sign below to see the photo set.
(And yes, I'm aware that the pictures are horribly underexposed.)
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A sign for some IT bigshot's reserved parking spot: CAUTION: Falling Coconut Parts. When the perp looks up, a mechanical monkey, set to motion detector, beans the perp with a coconut part! Need a transponder to disable the monkey. Wouldn't want yer own H2 to get beaned!
I spent some time in the Philippines in 1998. I've actually got a picture of a sign similar to this one. I loved the Philippines. Part of my stay consisted of 3 nights in a squatter's "lean to" - for lack of a better word - which was literally 3 feet from the train tracks in Pasay City, Metro Manila. Some of the industrious people there on the tracks built portable light weight trollies, and charged people to ride to where a point where the road met the tracks. When a train came, they just all got off and helped the driver pull the trolley off, and would stand there a foot from the the train until it passed. I learned a year or so ago, the whole place went up in flames.