Since I last wrote I have come and gone to Mindanao, the beautiful island in the lower third of the Philippines, and one of my favorite places on earth. In a quick four-day holiday we visited good friends at Christian's Haven, (CH), and the "College house", the first a ministry to orphans and street children, the second, a transition place for them as they attend college and move into the world.
Cagayan de Oro looked just the same from first glance, but it is a different city from the one I visited two years ago. In December of last year, the Sindong fell upon the city in a rush and roar of water that within hours had claimed the lives of well over 1,000 people. Older people would tell you that in all their lives they had never seen a typhoon of such magnitude and bringing with it such destruction. My friend Ate Jane told me that after it happened, if you walked along the streets, you saw bodies laying everywhere. They had to import coffins from Manilla because they simply could not make enough fast enough.
There is actually a refugee camp right in the same neighborhood as the College house. Our friends led us through it on our way out to the street. It is actually very tidy, more organized than most communities of urban poor. The houses are all constructed together in two or three long rows. Each row has perhaps 15 "houses", each one room, the size of the average bathroom. They are made of a basic frame of lumber and covered in blue tarps, with a piece cut out for a window, and a flap pulled aside for a door. As we passed through the camp, the women were squatting together doing their laundry. They smiled so cheerfully at us as we walked by. There were lots of children everywhere, very curious, and very very sweet.
The problem so many of these people have is that the government will not provide any support for them in a new life until they can provide the land title to a new piece of land. But if they were only squatters to begin with, there is no way they can afford to buy a piece of land. And they cannot go back to where they were before. It has all been washed away, but even still, the government does not want anyone living anywhere near the rivers which so indiscriminately swallowed up everything around them.
Out in the country at CH, the Lord truly protected my dear friends there. Although the river flows literally right beside the property, there is a high stone wall surrounding the campus. The Sindong eventually took the upper half of the wall away with it, but praise God, the water did not reach as high as the houses. They kids said they watched the river carry houses, caribau, vehicles, and trees with it. But my friends were all safe.
CH has changed somewhat in two years. There are many more little children now, most of them orphans from the Sindong in December. I didn't ask many of them their story. I think I was really just too scared to hear it. One little boy I fell in love with was only 8 but he looked more like 6. He was so tough looking, he always had this determined little frown on his face. We got talking about muscles or something one time and the end result was we ended up arm-wrestling. After a solid interval of straining, we decided to call us both winners. And I saw that tight, frowning mouth start to smile just a little bit at the corner.
I have more to say about our time on Mindanao, but I will end THIS post by saying that the day we were planning to leave, a huge storm hit Manilla and sunk a passenger ship, killing some of the passengers. Apparently, the storm was moving South towards us, and we had a TWELVE hour journey across open water to get home to Cebu. While freaking out to our college house friends, one of them (who happens to be a sailor), said, "so what are you afraid of?" "Of DYING!" we replied together. "Oh don't worry, if that happens, you'll just go to heaven anyways," he replied, satisfied he'd cleared up that problem.
We laughed at his calmness, but in the end, he's perfectly right. With Christ in your life, if the worse case scenario in any scenario is death, then what have we to fear, death has been conquored!
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