Thank you for your prayers!

Greetings! Sorry for the crazy delay....our internet has been down for a while and we've not been able to get the good news over e-mail....."what good news", you ask? Well, our cargo shipment of all my medical supplies will be arriving here in Davao on Thursday!!! YIPPPEEEE! Thanks Christina-mum! She worked hard to find a company that would ship to Davao and finally, after much perseverance, found a place that would do it! Now we have to pray that it doesn't cost a fortune!

God is good.

Thank you all for the e-mails, comments and prayers.....we have been so blessed and encouraged.

Pictured above is Tim cleaning up our giant mound of garbage....there's a story to that, too.....

You see, they don't really have garbage collectors here....they do, but not really....it's a bit of a run-around. We decided that we were going to place our garbage next to the garbage of the business downstairs after dark....so we started to do that...hence the picture....but Tim discovered something very quickly.

He place the first two boxes out on the dirt curb and went up the 36 stairs to get the next box, came downstairs and VIOLA! The two boxes had disappeared....

So he repeated the process and across the street, a restaurant guard started to chuckle, pointing and giggling at this big white guy hauling trash downstairs only for it to disappear moments later.

So, Tim, the big white guy, decided to find out what the chuckling was about....yeah, the guy didn't speak any English...so Tim went back upstairs and hauled some more trash (I was killing the mass-quantities of ants underneath the garbage...thanks for the tip on killing ants, Merrilyn! I will try it!).

So when Tim hauled a giant sheet of glass downstairs, one of the Filipino guys off the street came running toward him screaming to grab the glass (apparently he wanted it!)....so in the end, our trash didn't last on the street curb. Mmmmm. Hopefully it was a blessing to someone! :)

Then after our giant trash party, we decided to take some pictures of the beautiful sunset view from our porch! We have a view! The pics of the sky are looking up and the ones looking down are the views of our neighbors who burn their trash everyday. :) They have a farm of cats, too....they aren't pretty cats, but at least we get to see some indigenous wildlife! And then the dogs that bark all night live there, too. :)

And to finish off our busy day of running errands and getting new toilets (that's another story....our toilets didn't flush, so our dear community handy-man, Jun, installed beautiful white toilets that have two buttons!!! What a blessing!), we invited the ladies from the Orange House for cookies and Cranium. We had a gas and even broke one of the old toilets.....you see, we ran out of chairs for the girls, so we used an empty toilet as a chair....take note, "Porcelein thrones on tile floor do not mix...it is not safe"...there should be a warning on those! -- "Warning, when using toilet as make-shift chair for midwife, do not place on tile floor, toilet may shatter into millions of pieces".

A giggle or two later and there were MILLIONS of toilet pieces all over our tile floor. Midwives are messy. But we REALLY got to know the girls this way....we even christened the evening with bashing open a young coconut (it's harder than it looks). We had a great time and we are really looking forward to learning and growing with these ladies. What a blessing!

Today is another day of errands and tying up loose ends. A very Happy Birthday goes out to our niece, Justice! CONGRATS ON BEING 1!! And out to our brother, Ben! Happy, happy Birthday and we are sad that we aren't there to eat your birthday chocolate cheesecake. Be blessed!