Staff Blog

Ruth, Anthony, Andrew, and I traveled to the West Coast this past week to visit family and friends, giving us the opportunity to spend the afternoon with several "kids" who were adopted from CSC 15-20 years ago.  We were hosted by Neil and Nelia (Healy) Collins for a delicious lunch of Filipino fare.

Joining us from the greater Washington and Oregon area were Jennifer, Nolly, and Aida, along with their families and friends.  It was a great joy to be "cared for" by these wonderful "kids" whom we ourselves had cared for so many years ago.  We all got to wow over each other's families and share stories from the past.  Often the discussions drifted to the topic of how tall some at the gathering had grown and how vertically challenged others had remained.  Puzzling.

But an even greater joy was to see how these now young adults have grown in their personal lives, established loving marriages, had beautiful children of their own, and gone on to find success in life despite some challenges along the way.

It gave Ruth and me a great deal of satisfaction to see a few of the successes of CSC's ministry and the ongoing benefits children are having from adoption.  God has continued to bless so many who received the gift of a new family so many years ago!

I'd like to introduce you to Elesio Ewayan, or as he's known as around here, Sho.

Sho has worked at CSC for 13 years.

Sho is one of the reasons why, as a visitor recently told me; "the Children's Shelter of Cebu has the best kept facilities in all of Cebu."

If you're looking for Sho the first place to check is the workshop. The kids know that this is a place they can't play, but they will often times stand at the invisible fence in front of the shop doors as Sho works to patch the sole of a shoe, repair a desk drawer, or mix a batch of paint.

The workshop isn't state of the art, but it's amazing what he can accomplish with a basic set of tools.

When CSC's president Matt Buley came to Cebu earlier this year he met with the staff and handed out bracelets. The braclets had CSC's logo on them and the phrase "These hands change lives." As I watched Sho work I looked down and saw that he was wearing his bracelet.

What an incredible example of someone using their hands to change lives.

The Group 4 kids recently finished a video interview project for one of their afternoon classes. Everything about this was done by the students! The questions, the recording, and the video production. I hope you enjoy getting to know three of our very smart, creative kids in this video! :)

Loving life....and more specifically....hackysacks!  :)

Thank you to our visitors for giving every kid their very own hackysack---as you can see, they were eagerly received!

Last Friday was SRA Day at school!  SRA is our reading curriculum so it includes reading, writing, and spelling!  We spent the morning having some fun reviewing things the kids had learned in SRA throughout the year.  It started off with one student from each level sharing why they like SRA.  Then we had a cheer competition.  The children were divided into four groups and each group had 10 minutes to create their own cheer about SRA or reading.  It was cool to see what they came up with!  

After the cheering competition was the spelling contest!  The kids took turns writing letters or words on the white board as a review of things they had learned.  They also drew pictures that related to some of the themes our classes had studied.  Some of the older kids went up and explained how their pictures related to the theme.  

The final part of the program involved several presentations by our kids.  The Level A students performed sang "The Alphabet Song".  Jaime and Pretchy each did a beautiful job sharing poems about reading!  Shiela & Rowena sang a duet of "America the Beautiful", a song they learned in one of their reading units.  Then three of our Level C students shared stories they had written during class.   

Here are some more pictures from our exciting day!