After church on Sunday, Ely, Ricardo, Flint (APTS student), Eliz and I went uphill from Gumatdang all the way into the city to have lunch in 50′s Diner. We wanted to treat Flint who is finishing a semester the local seminary and will fly back to his family in Fiji next Sunday. 

Afterward Flint went home to study for a seminary test. The rest of us hastened to meet two Filipinas representing Operation Christmas Child , of Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse charity, which sends shoe boxes full of goodies to our poor sisters and brothers in developing countries.

Afterward, Ely and I went to do an errand then drove to Irisan, outside Baguio City to visit a family which desperately needs a new home, as their landlord wants to boot them from their dirt-floor shack without plumbing.

You would be amazed at the poverty outside the city even if you’re not struck by poverty in Baguio City. Unfortunately, the family, which Ely knows very well, wasn’t home, so we couldn’t visit with the mother, son and three daughters whom I have met previously.

The eldest daughter is studying in a local university, and they’re beautiful Christian people, the salt of the earth. So I was surprised to learn that they’re tormented by a vicious drunkard husband and father (out of town now), that they reside here and that they don’t own this house and are about to be evicted.

How do they live like this? As victims of violence living in poverty some distance from schools and church and good Christian friends? Though this lovely women and her offspring appear to be average, graceful churchgoers and students. What they feel inside, I can’t imagine.

I didn’t see the interior of this small sheetmetal shack with earthen floor. But in looking at the exterior and talking with Ely, I learned that the woven-sack and bamboo assemblage affixed to the wall beside the front door is a ‘CR’ (comfort room). That’s where they bathe? How?

Elizabeth looked inside

Apparently they wash their hands before cooking and meals in pans or basins that they fill some distance away, and to bathe/shower I suppose that they pour it over themselves, lather then rinse.

Hard to imagine. No running water. I wouldn’t like to bathe under a cool water shower or in a cool creek daily…

rear of CR and shack

another CR, meters away, across an dry creek, where perhaps the teenage boy bathes

I ask you to pray ardently for the welfare of this family which seeks to flee abuse and find safe haven in Turning Point Home. Eleanor, in her Turning Point Home for orphans, widows and abused, is trying to squeeze the five in. Ely needs about $250 to wall-in a room on the rooftop patio to accommodate the son and another boy so that the mother and daughters can take another room in the Home.

So please pray that aid will be found. Ely is quite willing to take into her home our poor sisters and brothers, but everything costs money. †