alright. after a long hiatus. i shall now blog. i apologise for the long delay. been too tired to blog.
yes, it's was very tiring over there. i'm still feeling the strain. it's like school, but requiring more energy.

so day 7 was MASS day. Went to the Our Lady of the Assumption Parish for mass where we had to serve as choir, lectors and ALTAR SERVERS. yes, Daniel and I served mass in the end, in our blue mission t-shirt and black jeans. and the server who was helping to guide the two of us around movement was this guy named John Christopher? haha he was nice and continuously nudged me around during the entire mass simply because i was the most convenient one to nudge. -.- well serving the mass was very interesting. for one, the servers are never seen by the congregation unless we're actually needed. and well, there's no kind of fixed decorum simply because, well, you're not actually seen. it's definitely a lot less strict than here in Holy Spirit. Father Gerard would probably flip if he saw the way the servers served mass there. and i'm not meaning that in any sarcastic manner. Well, they managed to get us to do quite a bit. I lit the advent candles and got wax on my shoes. Daniel and I helped out with washing of hands too. the rest of the way was just us blindly following whatever the servers there were doing. Oddly enough, when i was chatting a little with John, i found out that all the servers there were Seminarians. either they were about to be ordained, in the Seminary, or about to enter. and seriously, there were a lot of them. More than the total number of seminarians we have in Singapore, they have in one single parish. the scarier part was that pretty much the bulk of them were about our age too. John was 16, if i remember correctly. After the mass, i wanted to go take a picture with John, but never got the chance to. sad. I can still remember how he looks like, but my memory's really bad, so we'll see for how long? Well, after mass we went up to help out one of the Sisters with her catechism class full of people of all ages who were into their first lesson in preparation for Confirmation too. but the difference is that they only have 4 lessons before they get confirmed. so i got dragged in to give sort of like a last minute uhm, what's that called? i forgot. sort of like telling people about our confirmation journeys. which i only then realised that it was the one thing that i forgot to do before coming to bicol. so i said the first thing that came to my mind was the whole idea of self-discovery. which now that i think about it, is exactly what i would've said either way. This entire year has been a journey of self-discovery for me. of who i am and what i mean to people, to God himself. I believe God has a plan for each and every one of us. every up and down, every single time you entertain the thought of your faith being useless and God never being there. Every time you cry he's beside you. and every time you laugh, he smiles upon you. every time you fall, he's there to catch you to make sure you're not too hurt. and all he asks for in return for every grace he gives you, is to spread the Word. and that was the mission of Jesus. like in John's Gospel, it begins "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was Jesus" God sent his Son to preach the Word and he passes this responsibility to us through the rite of Confirmation! ok well, at least that's how i'm seeing it. ok now i shall stop sounding like i'm giving catechism. haha. well, the rest of the day was pretty sleepy. everyone was very much happy to have some rest. and i helped out here and there to plan for Dona Mercedes. i honestly cannot remember what else i did that day! OMG! there were probably a lot of scandalous activities though, just as there were everyday. haha. If i'm right, today was also the day where i tried to conduct a rosary session. and when i say "tried" i mean i pretty much BOMBED. so sorry to everyone for that!!! i obviously did not prepare reflections and ended up just making things up as i went along. which is really embarrassing.

DAY 8! the day we FINALLY go to Dona Mercedes. so we all woke up late again despite my constant effort to wake people early... had breakfast and then we moved off in the jeepneys [i think that's how you spell it. i called them the bus-ish things the last time] I was initially going into the first jeepney which carried all our supplies for the 3 days, but got shifted to the second one because the chapel people [which was what i was attached to for the first day], needed to get brooms and i was the most convenient chapel person to get off and ensure that we got the brooms we needed. so yeah, we stopped by the market where Jeanalyn and her friend, Ava? came to help us get the brooms. they helped to specially pick the better ones for Uncle Anthony and myself. [well, i didn't really get the difference, but they did. so, yay!] then we went back to the jeepney and apparently the driver himself had no idea how to get to Dona Mercedes, so Jeanalyn ended up helping to guide the driver. pretty funny actually. she was standing at the back of the jeepney and swinging about dangerously while being precariously perched at the edge of the stepping platform of the jeepney. I think i fell asleep after a while, the ride took just about as long as it did to get to Tagaytay. which is about 30 mins to 45 mins. and me being me, i can never stay awake on a moving vehicle, i mean, i even fell asleep on the tricycle taxis on the way back from Masarawag too! haha i think i fell asleep on Anne's shoulder that day. OK BACK TO THE POINT. bleah, i keep straying. so when we finally got there, i pretty much ran to the chapel to go check it out and try to spam photos of the place. we unloaded all the equipment and then we made our way to the elementary school where we were... entertained. by the many... interesting... performances. especially the feliz la vidad item and the two individual dance items of the boy with the stick and the same boy with, very big hand movements. i'll try to upload the videos one day to explain what i mean. haha. scandalous. so the entire morning was gone. and then we all decided only to begin work after lunch. since lunch was only half an hour away, and there was no point beginning anything much before then. but some of them began to help to clean up the chapel grills with wet cloths and water which we got from the nearby stream since the water pump at the back of the chapel didn't work. i got bitten by a red ant along the way while helping to get water. Rae too. Let me try to explain, the stream was like 100m away from the chapel in a jungle/plantation like place. and the only way to get across to the other side of the stream was a very unstable "bridge" that was pretty much just a halved coconut trunk buried in the ground which was by the way. VERY VERY VERY UNSTABLE. so it was either stand on the bridge, stay on the front side of the bridge and get attacked by red ants, or get to the other side which already had no space because the volunteer, the local helper and Rae where already there. so i ended up getting bitten by red ants. i still have a few dots here and there on my feet. so after lunch, kenneth, Uncle Anthony and I thought that maybe we could actually begin painting the walls today since we finished cleaning up way before lunch, and a whole bunch of them were already beginning to paint the grilles. so the three of us and Mark, the BUCAF volunteer, went out to go get paint. so we took the jeepney back to town to get paint from the paint shop opposite Guinobatan East School. and it was really cool the way the guy mixed the paint out for us. and fun to try out too. haha. then i began poking Mark and Kenneth and then after about half an hour at the shop, we finally loaded up the 32 litres of Margie coloured paint and 2 litres of white paint. next thing to get was the ladder. we were gonna buy one but Mark said we could actually borrow it from the local Police Station. because he had an uncle who was a police officer he could borrow from. but the station needed the ladder so we ended up going to Mark's cousins' house to borrow a bamboo ladder. then we went back and Kenneth and I began to help out to paint the grilles with the enamel paints too. i was standing on a chair on muddy ground painting so i actually nearly fell off the chair many times because the chair kept on sinking in... it was scary ok! haha and i shall not elaborate on the "rags" we used. SO SORRY LIZZIE!!!! we kinda used your t-shirt donations as rags. you know? the ijtppetshirts. :p and that kind of wraps up Dona Mercedes Day 1. Oh and we had coconuts to eat/drink. it was nice!!! and i felt so jealous at the fact that to convince Mark to eat the coconut flesh, i had to ask like 5 times. Rae asked once and he consented. -.- Just before dinner, the bunch of us were rushing out like crazy writing the lyrics for the carols and 8 copies at that. the night ended with us carolling at an old teacher of the university's house and at the volunteer Jeanalyn's house. which was awesome fun and i ended up skipping back to the dorm with Jonathan and Kevin i think. fun fun.

Dona Mercedes day 2 was an entirelt different experience from day 1. that day i was posted to Village outreach. so in the morning i briefly helped out at chapel for like what, half an hour? then it was off to the village with Mark Lee, Sam Chia and Uncle Al. oh, not forgetting the local guide. so we pretty much walked by the roadside the first 15 mins or so. then we walked into the forest. and sam and i were pretty much screaming out in anger about being cheated. because the group that went yesterday told us that there were BIG BREEZES. so cold YOU'D NEED A JACKET. and we didn't have to worry about SWEATING. oh please. total rubbish. it was like a real trek through the forest with only slight breezes and a lot of sweating involved. so Sam and I complained and whined a lot about it. and we were saying things like "seriously, i'm gonna kill whoever told me about big breezes. MUST BE KEVIN KE and GERALDINE MARK". ok so at the end of the day we didn't kill them, but you get the point. so we continued on and visited a few houses here and there along the way. seemed pretty random if you asked me. but i guess that's the beauty of adventure eh? chatted with a few families only to discover like the average number of children there was like, 10? which pretty much shocked us all. and so we left them giving them an oil lamp, milo and some biscuits. oh and at a few houses we sang carols! which was fun. There was one particular house where we sang rudolph the red-nosed reindeer and i was pretty much the only one singing because sam and mark weren't sure of the song... the baby of that house was SO DARN CUTE. i didn't wanna go... i wanted to play with that baby boy. i've got some pictures of him and his mother. so cute. so so cute. so we then went to our local guide's house. where she very nicely let us use her karaoke machine. haha. so we sang a few songs. and sam and i competed with Uncle Al. so Uncle Al sang "Father and Son" and we sang "Bohemian Rhapsody" Uncle Al got 91. which is impressive. but we got 92! HAHAHAHAHA. we won uncle al in singing! haha. ok so we sang a few other songs. and the thing is that the lyrics on the screen were accompanied by some very, inappropriate imagery of what i'd called soft-core pornography. and as i was singing rudolph i think, mark took a video of me and the screen. -.- so oh wells. after the karaoke, we proceeded back to the chapel where i was desperately in need of a toilet. and i had to hold in my bladder the entire walk back. which was both excruciating and disturbing. and yeah, i ran to the elementary school toilet and had the longest pee of my life. :D TMI? haha. so it was lunchtime. and we ate lunch quick before departing immediately, thinking that we'd need to visit 12 houses in the afternoon to make up for the 2 houses we missed out karaoke-ing. so we were pumped up, kinda lethargic after lunch and ready to go. and we began our trek through the forest. if we had thought this was gonna be easy, we thought entirely wrong. turns out we ended up having like a reliving of our OB experiences of Land Expedition. we walked through jungle, tall grass, bull poop, nearly walked across the river and nearly had to scale a wall. well funny parts of the trek was.... Mark slipping on moss on one of the rocks and falling onto wet rock on his butt. and his pants were khaki, so it was dirty and wet, very obvious to see. :D when we were walking across the bull poop. sam's shoe came off. and her sock stepped on it. so the rest of the day her foot smelled like poop. and for me, i think it was the most hilarious. when we were trying to find a way to cross the river, i was using my trekking stick to poke at a hole which was amusingly quite deep. then we moved forward and realised we needed to go back. so on the way back i stepped into that hole i was poking... and got both my shoes and socks entirely WET. and so i was trying to think, bright sides. and thought, hey, at least my shoes are clean. and then we trekked through more bull poop. -.- then just as my shoes and socks FINALLY dried... i stepped into another stream. wonderful. i was wet the rest of the way. the three of us were prettymuch wondering when the first house was gonna be. i mean, after say about an hour and a half of trekking, you'd get sick of it. and it turned out that we weren't going toward any house at all. we were going toward a famous waterfall in the area. something no other group was going to see. so we took pictures, stared in awe and got bitten by a colony of ants. then along the trek back, we gave provisions to every house we saw. which was quite funny for me in a weird way. so it was another LONG LONG LONG trek back and when we finally hit the main road. it was like "OH YES. FINALLY. CIVILISATION!!!!" and we pretty much chugged down a bottle of pop cola each. which btw, gave me bad... bad... stomachaches later. all the gas... and so that was pretty much the whole highlight for the day. i honestly cannot remember what we did at nights. because every night seems to be like, the same. :p

DAY 3 DONA MERCEDES was a very sleepy day. i guess everyone was really pooped by day 3. and so it was pretty quiet. helped out with chapel the whole day. did the final touching up in the painting. and i spent the morning doing a cross on the rostrum. and the afternoon in the elementary school. there was quite a bit of drama going on but i won't elaborate on that. anyways. helped out with the grade 2 class in the afternoon and when i was really supposed to be working on the closing video. michelle and jacintha kind of gave up after a while when they realised that the kids couldn't understand english at all. it's quite amusing actually. because the kids still don't understand english even though all the textbooks are in english too. i'm guessing the way the education system works there is a little different from other places. well other than seeing Ivan get really close to the grade 4 class, there wasn't really much to do. i played games with the grade 2 class which pamela eventually helped to take over. actually, thinking about it. seeing Ivan and the grade 4 class was actually really surprising for me. because i never expected, of all people, to see Ivan get so attached to the kids. I really saw a side of Ivan i had never seen before at that point. and in a way it kind of affected me too. because aside from my class in Guinobatan East, who, by the way, probably don't remember me anymore, i never really got close to any of the kids. i decided instead to be the guy who worked the background and helped out with logistics or admin and running around everywhere... never really staying at one spot long enough to get to know people. there always seemed to be something more urgent to do. or maybe it was just what i made it out to be. i dunno. it's kinda sad really, for me.

well that's day 7-10. i'll do up day 11 and 12 soon.