Update from Molly

Molly is on mission overseas. She is with Youth With a Mission and is currently doing some health care training that has taken her to the Philippines. Here's her latest update:

Subic Bay...the Philippines

Who would of thought, my travels have brought me to this lovely Nation! It's currently in the middle of summer here, so it's HOT, I think it's even hotter than Cambodia!

Our team of 13 people, from 6 different Nations, got down to business just 2 weeks ago. We've been workin along side a YWAM ministry called Project Life Subic Bay. We are working with 3 YWAM staff, who have committed themselves to a slum area on 12th street in the neighboring city of Olongapo.

Olongapo is where the US Military set up camp after kicking the Japanese out of the Philippines during WW2. The US sold it back to the Philippines and now it is called the "Free Port Zone" it's pretty much "on the right side of the tracks" We live on the other side:)

Olongapo is where we do most of our work. Every week we head in to town to teach a health care seminar to women who are interested in getting more basic training. Many of these women are single mothers who didn't have a chance at higher education, but have the desire to learn and make a difference! We have taught them about germs, hand washing, diarrhea, dehydration and next week is all about cough and cold. We use simple lessons and teach each lesson in variety, repeating over and over, to commit the lessons to memory and to give them examples of how they might teach it to others.

Some of the women who attend the seminar work at a Christian organization called CRU (Children's Recovery Unit) It started almost 10 years ago when an Irish Missionary saw the suffering in the local hospital and was compelled to help families to receive the health care they needed. Often times families can see the doctors, but can't buy the medicine. When they return home they don't know how to help the child recover and that in turn leads to more illness, sickness and even death.

We visited the hospital, did a small program for the children in there, I met a little girl named Eunice who had an abscess in her throat, it made it hard for her to talk, but we made bracelets together and she listened to stories. She is 8, and the only child in the hospital without a parent or sibling there. I also met a 2 month old baby girl with severe Pneumonia, I've never seen a child breath so quickly, the in drawing of her ribs was HUGE!, her mother was only 18 years old. I got to talk with her and pray for her child.

I've been visiting CRU to spend time with these sick children, they have a few who are healed and healthy. They receive severely malnourished children and keep them until they are healthy enough to be able to live, there are a few children with terminal illnesses. Iya is a little girl with down syndrome and a very weak heart, her lips and hands are constantly blue. A few that contracted Meningitis as babies and have permanent handicaps, a beautiful little blind 1 year old girl named Maria Tony.

I've spent time with these children and also encouraging the Philippino workers there in their job and sharing the Gospel with them.

The Philippines is mostly a Catholic Nation, but it is very different to our Catholicism in America. In their outward acts it seems more like Buddhism. Every home has a alter to Mary (we are talking big alter, with a place to kneel to pray) much like spirit houses. There are necklaces, bracelets, belts with tokens and small pictures of the disciples/saints on them. It's this strange twist, they use all the right names, but the truth is not present.

Evangelism here is so much fun! Most people know the stories, ie, the Easter story, but have only heard it as a story, often times I get to share my testimony about knowing the stories, going to church, but not knowing God, and how it's changed my life. How the stories are more than just stories now. We get to share at women's group in the slums, the women's prison, random clinics in villages, riding on the bus, walking on the beach, everywhere there are opportunities! God is moving here in Subic Bay, people from the slums are coming to know Jesus, drug users are coming to know Jesus and are being freed from drug addiction, I'm so glad to be here for the next 5 weeks to help bring truth and love in to the people's lives! This is exciting!

You can pray for our team as we continue with clinics, to have the wisdom to treat and to have the faith to see people healed.

Please continue to pray for Cambodia and the work that is getting down there, while I'm away. I have a million and two ideas about how to take what I've learned back to Cambodia.

Thanks so much ya'll.
Peace. Molly.