The Philippines!

Hey everyone! Well I finally was able to get somewhere with a plug and internet so let me tell you about my trip thus far. It has been so much fun so far and full of awesome memories. It is extremely hot here, it is about 85-90 degrees at 6 am with a good 75% humidity and it only gets hotter as the day goes on and then instead of cooling off in the evening it stays about the same, so basically I have been in constant state of sticky sweat since I got here! The food is not too bad, I am a picky eater but most days for breakfast we get rice (of course, you can even order rice at the mcdonalds here), eggs, some sort of sausage, bananas, mangoes, and some days bread with either blueberry or mango jam. Lunch is almost always rice with some blended up meat concoction to go on top and also steam sea weed or noodles, bananas and mangoes as well. Dinner time we, for the third time, get rice, some weird fried or dried fish thing (which stinks up the camp all day and doesn't taste much better), and Tang orange juice. The other day we got ice cream! It was so so good! A typical day for us is we wake up around 4am (mind you this isn't by choice, there is about 100 roosters on this tiny island we are on and they have consistently woken us all up with their loud "cock-a-doodle-dos" every morning starting at 3am, you can see why we all have plotted ways to shut them up), we then eat breakfast and then go up to the work site. The school we are building is at the top of the "hill" on the island so it is quite the hike up there! We work till about noon then come back down for some cooling off in the ocean and lunch. While up at the work site the boys are usually carrying heavy bags of cement and sand or cinder blocks from the beach up to the school and we have lots of help from the islanders which has made things move a lot quicker. It is improper around here for girls to do any manual labor like help carry heavy things and such so mostly we girls just keep waters filled, pour the made cement, play with the kids, and do easy odd jobs. After lunch we come back up to the work site and work some more and once we are all dying of heat we leave for the day. The sun sets real early here so usually at night we eat around 6-7pm which is already dark so lots of the time a few of us are so tired we eat a granola bar and head to bed. Sleep can be hard to come by here without some sort of medication, we've been passing around ambien's and dramamine's to people so they can stay asleep for at least 5 hours. The reason for this is that the isaldn gets electricity from 6pm-12am. so the islanders like to play music...very loudly...the whole time and then you get about 3 hours of quiet before the roosters start thinking the sun is up. It is a shock for us all going to bed at 7pm and waking up at 4am....haha I don't think I'd ever do that at home! The bathroom facilities here....well there is a toilet, but no back or seat or toilet paper, needless to say, I was very happy our hotel had a flushing toilet :)Bugs bugs and more bugs! We sleep in single mosquito netted tents so we don't get eaten alive which has been heavenly because I do not like bugs. There are the BIGGEST spiders here and make me want to scream every time I see them, red ants (I have been bitten by quite a few and they hurt, cockroaches and mosquitoes. The kids are very fun, quite a few speak english...mostly the older ones who have attended school. They always say hello when you walk by and wave. The first few days they were all pretty shy around us all being here but they have come to realize we aren't that bad and now follow us around. We usually have a crowd of about 20-30 kids up at the work site wanting to help, watch, and play games and the same at our camp site. We taught them things like hand clapping games, ring around the rosie, head shoulders knees and toes, and lots more. They taught us this funny game called "Boo-la-kla" not sure if thats how you spell it but thats how it sounds. We are spending the next few days in a hotel on the main island so we got to have mango shakes (absolutly the greatest thing I ever tasted in my life) and pizza hut last night! american food is awesome! haha. Funny story, we were all walking through the mall to get to pizza hut last night and while leaving, Pete (our fearless leader), was in front and we walked past these two little boys and they said something in tagalog and Pete just starts laughing, so I asked what they said and I guess when he walked by the little boys said "Holy crap! that guy is huge!", it gave us all a laugh. Well thats all for now, I'll try to keep this more updated but there is a bit of what been happening here so far!