Our first days in Manila

This is Hannah signing in for team. It's Sunday night here, we are all giddy with jet lag fatigue, our feet are blackened by Manila street grime, but our hearts are happy. It has been a whirlwind of three days filled with activity! Thursday night we arrived in Manila at about 12:30 am, slept a few hours and rose early friday morning to the sounds of busy streets outside our windows and roosters loudly crowing. Our team hopped tricey cabs (a motorbike with a small steel cage approximately the size of a Rebekah, Carolyn, and I folded into a sweaty ball of flesh...) to a very poor part of the city, and walked down narrow walkways in between makeshift homes to a birth clinic of a Filipina midwife, Cecille. There were chickens, children, stray dogs, women washing clothes in buckets and hanging them from wires in between dwelling places.

The air here is heavy with humidity, and the heat is about 400 degrees I believe, it's wonderful. (Although some members of my team differ with me on this.) At the clinic the girls assisted Cecille with prenatal checkups while Micah and Steve played in the sewage-laden streets with the children. We could hear delighted giggles and shreaks from the children through the windows for a bit, then they proceeded to play in a cement area that serves as a basketball court. The women that came to the clinic were a joy to us, they laughed and smiled, eyes alive, taught us Tagalog patiently and laughed in delight as we tried to speak it. Leah showed us how to check fetal positions, and we taught Rebekah how to take vital signs. After each assessment, we prayed with the women, and they blessed us more than we could have blessed them, this I know.

Some boys ran in wide eyed, exclaiming to Leah, "your boys are singing!" As we followed them down the walkways to the basketball court, we heard Micah and Steve's voices singing loudly through a Karaoke machine. Their backs to us, we watched them laughing and singing, crowds of families were gathering from their homes and laughing and singing along with them. Steve's rendition of "with arms wide open" is now the preferred version in the Philipines...and we will never forget it.

Saturday Dr Daytek led us to Welfareville (yes, it's really called that) and we joined two women from the Vineyard church, Michelle and Zenith to set a check up station in front of the church's feeding program there. Welfareville is one of the poorest areas of Manila. The homes were very primitive, and streets mostly dirt. Sewage runs along the roadways, rats and stray cats and dogs are scavaging for food. Children ran along side of our tricey cabs, laughing, excited to see us. We set up makeshift assessment stations in the courtyard with plastic tables and chairs. The sun beat down on this cement, cooking us as we moved about. Mothers poured in to fill the courtyard, each with babies and several children in tow. We assessed mother and children, all of us with assigned tasks of different vital signs or heart/lung checks to process them efficiently. Many children were fevered, listless, and obviously ill. There were children with mumps, pneumonia, and viruses that had been to a doctor but could not afford the medicine prescribed so they came to us for help.

One infant caught our eye, she layed limply in her mother's arms, struggling to breathe, her eyes closed. I held her in my arms, and felt the rattle of congestion in her lungs racking her ribcage. Her head and body were burning to touch. Carolyn and I assessed her, and before taking her to Dr. Daytek..held her in our arms and prayed. We prayed for her healing, immediate, knowing that in these conditions, her chances at life were so very slim at best. We then passed her to Dr Daytek, where he explained her care to her mother, gave her antibiotics and instructions. These mothers and children stayed with us and were fed, then watched as we looked at the others. At the end of our day here, Carolyn shouted for me to come and look, she beamed excitedly as only Carolyn could, and pointed to our small baby. There she was, sitting on the hip of her unconcerned mother, eyes open and alert, happy and bouncing as a baby should, fever gone. Her mother still clutched the unopened antibiotic in her hands. God is so good, so powerful.