We made it! After 30 plus hours of traveling, we finally arrived at our final destination. Right now we’re in the first town we lived in when we moved to the Philippines. We’ve spent the last few days going through a few things we left here in storage. Termites got into some of our boxes and ate through books, towels and left us a great big MESS to clean up. Other things have been growing mold while we’ve been gone. We even found mold growing in our car. This week we head down to the second town we lived in during language school. We are hoping that our stuff down there fared better then our stuff up here but that is yet to be determined.

We’ve been checking into getting our things shipped over to Palawan and it is looking like it will be a little pricy. We’re praising the Lord that before we left the States He started to provide for this special need. Please PRAY that we would find someone who would be willing and able to ferry our car to Palawan for us. We will all be flying over to Palawan as a family and we are hoping that Jason would not have to fly back to Mindanao and ferry the car back over himself. It will be quite a trip as it has to go all the way up to Manila and then over to Palawan and will take probably about a week.

The kids are finally getting adjusted to the time change. We are 15 hours ahead of Arizona so is has been almost a complete flip flop from day to night. There have been a couple of girls here at the guest house where we are staying that Mirielle has been able to play with which has made the transition so much easier for her – Praise the Lord! Please continue to pray for her as she gets used to things here. She has been having a hard time lately as every time we go out people want to touch her gorgeous white skin. Kellan thinks the attention is great, but Mirielle isn’t exactly thrilled with being mobbed and then having everyone touch her on top of being up close in her face. Please pray for us too, that we would have wisdom in knowing how to handle these different situations.

It is funny that we could forget so quickly how things are here. Here are some “Oh Yeah”s that we’ve had since coming back.
* The Philippines must be the karaoke capital of the world. After 6 hours of hearing the neighbors sing (only a few of them had decent voices) we were ready to go crazy! You just can’t get away from it no matter where you go. Even at the mall, there are girls selling videoke CDs and they sing along in the microphones belting out Brittney Spears and Celine Dion songs at the top of their lungs.
* After sorting through our stuff we remembered what it was like to live with the smell of mold. Smoke is another smell we live with here as someone is always burning their trash.
* Driving down to the mall in the port city near by we were reminded that where you break down is where you fix it. All along the road there were trucks broken down and they simply stop in the middle of the road (only 2 lanes) and mark the fact that they are broken down and not moving by putting a few branches or rocks behind their car.
* McDonalds is a taste of home, but they always have some kind of Filipino dish that makes us wonder, or shudder. This month it was a ‘trio’ dessert - basically a sunday on top of jello. Yuck!

While we are readjusting to all of the little and big changes of being back we are praising the Lord for his faithfulness in bringing us back. It was hard saying goodbye to friends and family again and we were sad that once again we were having to leave home. However, when we touched down in the Philippines we felt like we were coming home. The Lord is truly good!