Somedays I forget my skin is still a novelty to many around here. I'll catch someone staring and automatically wipe my nose just in case I have a booger hanging out. Then I stroke my hair to make sure it's not crazy. When all is good I suddenly remember I'm "puti" aka white. Directly in Juagdsan they are so used to it because there are three of us around all the time. We met another single white lady who has been living in Panglao for 10 years. She came to stay for a few days and didn't know we were there until later because we were away the first part of her visit. When we finally met her commemt was, "I wondered why they weren't staring at me around here. Now I know why!"
I'm contemplating this right now because I'm currently returning to Juagdan after a visit to Cebu to extend my tourist visa for what I hope is the last time (I should have the missionary one before this expires) and just caught a young man staring at me. Then I realized several of the women were too. The funny thing is now it just makes me smile or even laugh when I realize it is happening.
As stated above I had to renew again because my name has not appeared on the approved list yet. Please be praying with me that it does show up in the next month. (If not I'm not sure what the next step is going to be.) I will say that I've renewed enough times that it seems like a smooth process and this was the quickest one yet. Only 2 1/2 hours! It just means I might get home before dark this time. 😀
Classes are now 7 weeks down and I'm definitely in a routine. Although I will admit this past week was a bit rough because my routine was thrown off more than once. One day when I was supposed to be doing a one on one tutoring session I was called away to meet someone for lunch. (Thankfully the student understood and we just moved it to the next day) Then Saturday we had a scheduled brownout. That means no power from 6am to 6pm. I wasn't told until almost 10pm the night before and didn't think about the fact that I had not printed enough worksheets for all my classes! Yep, we still had classes even with no power. 😅 The first two classes it's no big deal because the daylight is enough. But the sun disappears shortly after 5pm and my last class is from 5-7pm. Well we improvised. The girls who are the most faithful showed up at 4pm and asked about class. I was ready so we started early and only met for 1 1/2 hour instead of 2 hours.
Around here being flexible is a must. Most days I'm good with it, but man did this past week suck it out of me! I'm so exhausted and because of this trip I'm behind on both laundry and lesson planning so I don't know what I'm going to do!
It's okay I'll come up with something...hey "Do the laundry" is one of the things we introduced this past week!
Update: Three days later... I did make it home before dark and had dinner with the family😁 Laundry was more than usual, but still done by noon along with lesson plans. Laundry was even dry by bedtime! But last night I forgot about Bible study...oops.
