Phillippines and Phun Times

One perk of being staff, is you get to know vital information a little bit before the students. Not a whole lot before, but every day counts. One bit of vital info we learned a little while ago is the outreach locations. This school, outreach will be to the Middle East, Phillipines, and New Zealand like last time, but some new locations that teams will go to is Thailand, Fiji, and New Zealand/ Tahiti. I didn't really have much of a preference, so I didn't put anything down when the leadership asked us where we wanted to go. Took a bit of a risk there. We learned about a week ago where we were going, and this outreach I am going to the Philippines. It's exciting, but I'm also kind of nervous about it. Mainly because none of the girl staff that I'm living with are on that team. There is a girl staff, Madeline if you recall her, on the team which I'm glad to have someone older who's been to the Philippines a couple times before. There are two other staff on the team as well, two guys about my age who I get along with so there shouldn't be any problems there. It's just unfortunate that none of my good friends here are going to be going with me. I'm optimistic it'll be a good outreach. Our team is pretty big too, there's about 17 of us in total.  

Besides outreach prep and classes, we have quite a bit of free time scattered throughout the day. I've become pretty tight with one of the new girl staff members from Canada, and so one thing we really like to do is play volleyball. Surprising, I know, but it's actually pretty fun. Probably because there's no spandex, ribbons in the hair, or team cheers when we play. This is street volleyball. This is real life. Most afternoons we have free we'll wander all over the campus until we have enough players to play. Mostly guys will join us, so the games can be pretty intense. We also have been trying to work out and stay more in shape, so we go on runs along the country road and will do butt and ab workouts that we find on Pinterest. Another thing we've been filling spare time with, is collecting produce from trees on campus. We discovered that a tree down by the classroom is actually a macadamia nut tree so we spent a good afternoon knocking them down, collecting them, shelling them and peeling this sticky white mess of of it, and now we have to wait 2 weeks until they dry. We also discovered a pear/apple cross fruit tree, and some orange trees. Bananagrams has also been a pretty big part of my free time. My days are basically filled with running, banana grams, and food scavenging.

Something exciting (well at least I think so) is that I've discovered a store in a mall about 5 minutes away that not only has a bunch of cartilage rings, studs, and other accessories (I bought a pretty sweet cartilage ring the other week) but also does nose piercings for either $15 or $30 depending on the stud. Even $30 is a great price. I just might do it. No matter how lesbian Annie Rong thinks nose piercings are. So basically things are going pretty sweet here. It's still summery weather, we live 5 minutes from a beach, and I get to spend all day every day with friends from around the world. Not as cool as you all back home, but hey, they'll do ;) . Miss y'all!