The Journey

Getting to Manila was about as difficult as getting home from Mexico in '01 (Nick knows what I mean....). Due to circumstances of the insane kind, we managed to miss the cutoff for our flight by 2 minutes in Charleston. This meant that we missed ALL of our flights. So we got another flight to Charlotte later in the day. Then from Pheonix we went to San Francisco. Then we had to stop and spend the night there.

We caught a transPacific flight the next day which got us to Hong Kong 14 hours or so later. But the Philippines Airlines wouldn't let us on the plane. We were booked correctly, but they refused to check the notes section of our files and since we didn't have a paper ticket they wouldn't let us aboard. (They wanted to charge us $1800 per person for the 2 hour flight from Hong Kong to Manila.)

So we spent the night in Hong Kong and traveled to Manila today. It's all good, though. We're fine, and we had a great adventure. But the journey itself was a bit frustrating (at least for me, since I was the guy on site and trying to negotiate through all these barriers - the students responded wonderfully).

Manila is great. Very warm and humid. Tomorrow we're going to be at a feeding program and teaching people in the area how to build water filters. Tomorrow night is a concert and we'll be participating in leading parts of it (not me, of course, but some of the more musically talented people in the group). Jet lag has hit some of them harder than others, too. But they should be fine by 6:45am, when we have to leave to the outreach.

If there's a lesson anywhere in this, maybe it's just that the small things in life can create huge difficulties. We were only 2 minutes late, 120 seconds. Not a big deal, until it becomes a big deal. It's important for us in life to stay on top of things, even the little things, so that they don't become a big deal later on.

Hands of Hope

This is a shameless plug for Hands of Hope. Hands meets every Tuesday night from 6pm - 8pm at the Convoy warehouse in Springfield (east of Glenstone and just south of Chestnut). Volunteers from all over - of all ages - get together and bag groceries, or sort clothes, or unload boxes. Basically, anything that needs doing and that takes a lot of people.

The great thing about it is that, in just 2 hours each week, a volunteer can literally make a difference in hundreds of lives around the world without ever leaving the city. It's a great thing, and I plan to continue doing it even after my time at Convoy ends. I want to invite all of you to come out on Tuesday nights, too. Check it out. It really is rewarding, and it really makes a difference to the world.

I've Been Monk-ed!

So the other night in Oklahoma I broke into a monestary. No kidding. How many people in the world can say that?

By the time we got back from the International Student dinner, the gate was locked. But the monks told me it would be and gave me a code to open the gate. Problem was, the lock wasn't a code lock. It was a key lock. So at 11pm at night, we're all in the van, about half a mile from our cabins.

Option 1: Call a monk at 11pm. I don't know if monks are allowed to get cranky, but since they rise at 4:50am, I'm thinking that an 11pm phone call might be enough for a monk to lose his salvation.

So we chose Option 2. We jumped the gate and walked down the gravel road in the pitch black for half a mile or more. Literally, we broke into a monestary. The next morning I hiked back to the van, after the brothers had opened the gate, and drove it down to our cabins.

The monks never said anything. Maybe it was a mistake. But, just maybe, it was a monk idea of a practical joke. Maybe I was monked.