Staff Blog
Carmelita Baya, our Senior Social Worker, led a team from CSC that went to Leyte to distribute relief goods. She was accompanied by Edwin Martinez, our veteran driver, his brother Jessie Boy, one of our maintenance men, and Dondon Enriquez, our Eicher Home house father, who accompanied the team as far as his mom's place in Ormoc, one of the places on our list for relief goods. Dondon's mom's house was destroyed in the recent typhoon Yolanda.
We had a list of 10 families to help, and the team was able to find all of them. The all live in Western Leyte, from Biliran island in the very north, to Hilongos in the south. Praise God that none of the families experienced loss of life, though most of their houses were destroyed. Finding food and water are still big problems in Leyte, the hardest hit of all the islands. Our team brought boxes of food and sacks of rice, as well as clothing and some tarp to help with temporary walls and ceilings. They were all thrilled with what we were able to bring and were thankful that CSC has not forgotten them. Most of the families are birth parents and siblings of former CSC residents who have been adopted in the United States.
We were able to send one our CSC vehicles on a ferry between Cebu City and Ormoc, Leyte, so we had reliabe transportation for the trip. Since there is no gasoline for sale on the island of Leyte, we brought our own in plastic containers.
Thanks be to God for a safe trip, and that we were able to brighten the lives of these three families. Next we will be considering how we might help, even in a modest way, with the reconstruction of the destroyed houses of these families.
God bless all who gave for these relief efforts, and for our brave team for going over to Leyte to distribute goods and hope to these families.
Click here for more pictures of the Leyte relief trip.
J-O-Y!
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!
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SRA Day!
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!
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Friends
Friendships are an important part of life at CSC. Although most of our children have siblings at CSC (about two thirds), they all seek out friends in their age group and enjoy hanging out, playing, making music and talking about life. Our kids can easily find friends who have similar backgrounds and can understand and accept what they have gone through in life. Some friendships can go on for several years, depending on how long the children stay at CSC. When a child leaves for adoption there are often sad friends left behind who wonder if they'll ever see them again. In some cases, friendships that began at CSC can pick up later on when children are placed in the same geographical area. Check out a few pictures of friends at CSC:
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Movie Night
One of the things we often hear at CSC is laughter, and one of the best places to hear it is during a movie night.
It's hard to organize a trip to the movie theater, so often times staff will gather up a group of kids and setup the projector in the library at the school. The movie night below was a "girl's night out" that Teacher Lindsay organized. However, being the IT guy, I was allowed to attend because I had to setup the screen and projector. :)
The movie was Mr. Popper's Penguins.
It's hard to see much in the video below, but it's really fun to listen to the laughter of the kids.
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The Littlest Waveboarder
Waveboarding is the cool thing to do during playtime here at CSC. Lots of the older kids got waveboards for Christmas, but recently more and more of the little kids want to try the waveboards as well. The other day I noticed this little lady trying out her older sister's waveboard in the driveway and I couldn't stop laughing - it was so cute! And she's so good at it!
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