The other morning, out front of one of the buildings of Jeff's work, some men were cutting the grass. Sounds normal enough, doesn't it. The manner of which they were achieving their task was not normal (in Jeff's eyes). They were sitting on paint cans while pulling the grass out with their hands and creating neat little piles with this grass. I know they have whipper-snippers...not sure why they weren't using them.
Yesterday Jeff was relieved to see actual speed limit signs being put up on a major road on his route to work. The speed limit is 60 kph, and the police have reported in the paper they have started to enforce it!
An interesting indicator of the depth of corruption in this country - an organization was encouraging businesses to sign a declaration that they would not be involved in any corruption or bribery. So far, 343 companies had signed and they were hoping to reach 1000. Only one of the largest ten companies in the Philippines had signed, and NONE of the ten largest construction companies had signed. Good luck, Philippines.
A week ago I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Asian Pastors' Conference that was held here in the Philippines. This is a yearly gathering of pastors (and their spouses) from English speaking international churches from across Asia. We all headed down to a resort in Anilao (diving area!) for the week. What a privilege to have Earl Palmer be our guest speaker (http://www.earlpalmer.org/) and we worked through Philippians. I thoroughly enjoyed spending time with these pastors and their spouses from Hong Kong, Japan, Guam, Malaysia and other place. So much to learn about multicultural international churches existing in countries that are not Christian. (and we had the opportunity to snorkel and dive!)
A few weeks ago Jeff and I went to the American Memorial Cemetery in Metro Manila. This cemetery has the largest number of US military graves from WW II, with 17,202 plain white cross and star of David markers. Along with those, the circular walkway also lists 36, 285 missing Americans and Filipinos (plus a few other nationalities - we found one Canadian).
The Global Peace Index for 2010 was just published, a ranking of 149 countries on a number of factors about its internal and external peace. The Philippines was country 130 while Canada was number 14. Quite a difference! We found it interesting to note the US was ranked 85, while Bolivia was number 81. Go Bolivia! To see the index click here.
Speaking of peace, mothers stop reading now.
For the rest of you, we had another horrible incident yesterday not far from our home. A bomb was placed under a seat on a bus, exploded, killing five and injuring 13. It has been five years since there was a bomb explosion in Metro Manila, so as you can imagine, security is much tighter today.
That is January in the Philippines - never boring. Love you all
One last shot of a typical neighbourhood (not in Makati, the city we live in)
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