ten ₱esos

Easter morning , Dominic, Pie and I rode a jeepney down a very winding road into a valley, to the village of Gumatdang. The principal industry is mining for gold. And the natives farm vegetables, pigs and chickens.

We crossed a swaying suspension bridge over a murky creek where villagers pan for gold and saw the modest Agape Church (Assembly of God), the parsonage, where worship services were conducted before the church was completed two years ago, and we met Pastor Espino, his wife Raciel and Esra.

We met Lydia and Lawrence, two Vietnamese missionaries, we saw Bob and Alma and their daughters and son, Pie’s nephew Josef, and most of the gang from Turning Point Home ready to worship with the villagers.

Pie, Dom and I visited (interrupted) Ricardo’s Sunday School class in Agape Day Care Center behind the church

Agape Day Care Center, on Monday through Friday, is the preschool which Eleanor’s Turning Point Development Program instituted.  It’s beautiful -truly a gem in the near-wilderness of Gumatdang.  It’s really a bright, clean, colorful, charming place for eager young minds to be led. It has nice indoor CRs (restrooms).

26-year old Rick teaches a Sunday School class and is really adept at serving children and leading them to the Lord. he speaks from the heart, he plays guitar, he leads them in song …  He’s a gifted youth minister.

Later , Dom and I learned that Ricardo had labored very hard for four years to build-up this compound and the buildings.  He and others dynamited huge (VW Beetle-size) boulders in the muddy creek then hauled the rocks up the bank to fill in the slope -make a level place- and to make a foundation of rock for the church building and a porous, rock-and-sand septic system.  The crew built a church, pastor’s residence, and parish hall of poured cement and cinder block, plus cinder block pigpens, a garden, sidewalks, a cemetery, etcetera.

A huge investment of sweat equity for four years without the machinery which Americans wouldn’t do without. A tremendous, commendable effort. If you could stand there and see what hardworking men built with their hands, way out in the country, way down in a valley, on the ‘wrong’ side of the creek … The laborers would drive on the road that we did, park, then send supplies on a conveyor box hanging from a pulley on a cable across the creek to the build site.

boys with suspended conveyor box

Joseph Mendoza

Dominic and I enjoyed the worship service and afterward conversation with Filipinos and a late lunch. I didn’t have quite as much quiet conversation with various people as Dominic did, because I talked with Rick then followed him through the very hilly, lush green countryside to escort some of his small pupils to their homes out in the sticks. I don’t know if he does that weekly. I think that Ely wanted Ricardo to show me where our poor brothers and sisters live out in the country. She had told me to bring my camera and had told me to dress down; not to wear my favorite shirt, necktie and fine trousers and shoes as I had last night.

goats really do eat garbage

This is austere living – no toys, no tricycle, no bicycle, no ping pong table, no PlayStation 3, no television, no microwave oven, no ceiling fans, no (electric) space heater, no power tools, no water bed, no master bedroom, no hot water, no shower … †