Day 11

If you were to ask any one, one of the hardest things to do is to say good bye. If you were to ask the team, today would be one of those tough days were we had to say good bye to some of the most precious people we have met on the mission trip.

This morning a few girls woke up at 3:30am to help out at the bakery, which included packing and stacking the bread rolls. Then we went out into the town to help them sell their fresh pandesal.  Along with the excitement of waking up at 3:30 and helping out at the bakery, we were privileged to hear the sounds of the pigs squealing whilst being slaughtered by the boys, which had stayed the night at the IRC. With all the events of the morning, we ventured back to the white house to enjoy our last meal by the wonderful cooks, this included French toast, Bacon and eggs and Rice which was shoved down extremely fast as we wanted to get back to the IRC to spend as much time with the boys as possible before we left town.   

After breakfast we went back to the IRC where we were to make our last goodbyes to the boys which have impacted our lives so dramatically over the past 9 days. This was a very emotional time as our hearts took over our minds which allowed us to express our emotions that were being held in as we left half our hearts with those special boys, the community and the IRC. The faces of the boys as we left them tore our hearts into pieces and cuddles that they gave us made it all the more harder to leave the place that has changed many of our lives.

After the long goodbyes from the IRC family we went to the Ikthus church for our celebratory lunch, where we enjoyed fabulous dancing from the filipino’s and the youth group. We also enjoyed the baboy (roasted Pig) which the boys so enthusiastically helped kill (Elliot, Reuben, Nick and Drew) in the morning at 5 o’clock. The food for lunch was simply amazing as we enjoyed the last fried chicken and spring rolls provided by our wonderful cooks.

Once lunch was eaten we enjoyed fellowship with the people of the Ikthus family and the locals of Cabacungan community. This also stirred up emotions that contributed to the hard task of saying goodbye.

Once Lunch was eaten and we said our final goodbye’s we headed to the bus only to find two little boys, Junifer and Ariel which had walked from the IRC to see us again. The long bus ride to Bacolod gave us time to process our thoughts and to catch up on extra sleep. Once we arrived at Bacolod we had one hour to get settled in and to meet back in to lobby to go to the local shopping mall, This one hour soon turned into one hour settling in our rooms and one hour waiting in the lobby for Mr Beacham and Paster Pete to come back from getting hair-cuts. We caught Jeepney’s to the shopping mall and had to speak tagalog to the driver to get us to there. Once at the shopping mall we transferred our money and had one hour to spend looking around and shopping, after shopping we headed to a chicken house to have some more inasal chicken which was very tasty.

We then returned to the Hotel and wrote in our journals and had our daily debrief. We then went to our rooms to get ready for bed and our 4:30 wake up tomorrow morning for our 15 minutes of fame on breakfast TV.

Until tomorrow, keep safe xx

Emma xoxox