Hello dear readers!
After a great, full seven weeks in Mindanao I have sadly parted ways with my students over at Faith Academy Davao. Even though my stay on last that short number of weeks, I really grew to love the community of teachers, students, and missionaries (and others!) that I worked alongside. It was very challenging for me to be away from my family and friends for as long as I was...well, actually I still am, but at least while I was in Davao I was able to become part of a new family and make some new friends. Friends that includes those who are older than I and those who are younger than I!
I saw that Fire-Star Warrior (if you are confused--just pretend like you see a regular name there) has asked when I'll be getting back. Well, the following shows everything that I currently believe is going to happen in the next few months:
December 16th - Fly back to Rhode Island for Christmas with the family and friends in Rhode Island (with my fantastic four buddies all going to be there!)
December 29th - Fly back to Indiana. Celebrate a friend's birthday, as well as surviving through another year. Yay!
January 3rd - Start my last class as an undergraduate at Taylor. This will only take the month of January. Sadly, during this month I'll be without two of my closest house buddies. (I believe that sometime during this month I'll be able to make a stop at RJB. The problem is, my class is MON-FRI, so there will be some classes that I'm never able to visit).
February to who knows when - Being graduated from Taylor. At this point I'm going to try and find a substitute teaching job nearby. This will hopefully include at Mississenewa. Either way I will certainly be able to visit RJB on a few occasions. Hopefully I will also be able to spend some time in Rhode Island with family.
The truth is that I know very little about what will happen after that, dear readers.
As can be seen, I'm still not at home yet! I'm in the city of Manila, at the other Faith Academy campus. While the campus that I taught at had only 60 students in the high school, this one is well over 600 students. I know that 600 students isn't actually too many (my high school was pretty similar), it is still strange to be at an entirely new place AGAIN! I'm living with an Australian family for the next few days (terrific humor and accents) and everyone here has been very kind to me. Still, I'm definitely feeling the small, family feel of Davao that I grew accustomed too.
While I'm not exactly hiding from the world, I'll probably just spend most of the next three days hiding in the library doing work. I've also promised some friends of mine that I'll stop at an orphanage nearby, so I'll probably be doing that tomorrow.
I'm planning on posting more pictures of the end of my Davao stay soon.
Also---good luck to all of the students in exams! Go get'em!
