Adventures in Manila Pt 1

I'm blogging from the OMF guesthouse in Manila . . . and I shouldn't really be. But I do find that writing down what's been going on when things are a bit intense helps me process and unwind.

So here are a few highlights of the last three days.

I left for the airport straight after church, travelled the 1 ½ hrs on three trains, and went through all the procedures for catching an overseas flight. No real hitches! Phew!

In the midst of it all I realised that it really was only about the fifth time that I've flown overseas on my own. Usually I've been with family or at least one other person!

Where I'm spending my days.

My chief concern was the plan to link up with someone from the UK who landed at a different terminal and to catch a taxi together (for about an hour). Getting public transport in a country I'm unfamiliar with is not something I'm super confident about! But we eventually managed, not only to get our electronic communication to connect, but also to find a taxi that wasn't going to charge us an arm and a leg.

The workshop started Monday morning. It is about mobilising people for mission using social media and the web. I was surprised to find that I'm a bit further along in what I know than many of those at the workshop, but still I know (and continue to have found out) that there is much, much more I could potentially learn or do. I think that's the challenging part of it. What you can do seems almost unlimited. You could certainly spend far more hours of the day than I have, doing it.

View out our bedroom window. There's a not-so-quiet
10-lane road in front of that church!

My notes are full of action points and things to further investigate. I'm certainly not bored. After all, there aren't too many all-day meetings that you can go to when you can "fool around" on Facebook, while totally being on-task!

I had the yummiest fruit for lunch today: mango! Something that is a rarely enjoyed treat in Japan. These were just perfect.

Screen shot from my phone from early afternoon.

But sleep is something I've struggled with, as usual when I'm away. First night I tried to sleep in the muggy heat (long story about the aircon that I decided not to put on). 

Last night my roommate and I decided the air con was a good idea and I slept a lot better, but was woken at 5am with torrential rain. 

5am is my body clock's 6am, about when I'd usually get up on a Tuesday, so it isn't surprising to me. But I've been "going" with little break now for about 15 hours, so I really need to call it quits. Workshops like this are really stimulating. So many ideas, so much to learn. It is hard to switch off. And, of course, I've got other things going on too (I was proofreading between sessions today and answering emails also).

The rain continued to periodically pour down torrentially all day. Apparently there was flooding in various areas of Manila, but we are high and dry. I haven't even been outside since Sunday!

There's much more I could write, but really, really I need to go to bed.

Encouragement from our local church

This was our pastor taking a photo of the congregation of the
9.15am congregation on the 56th anniversary early this year.

One thing I love about our Japanese home church is that it is balanced. It has a wide range of ages—from babes to elderly and most of what’s in-between (a thinning in the teen to young adult range, though). The other balance we’ve repeatedly seen demonstrated over the years is its view of its place in the world. It is not insular.

It is rooted in the local community which is demonstrated in events like the annual summer festival and weekly café. They’ve just started an afternoon homework-type club for local kids.

It’s a rooted in Japan, demonstrated by concern for ministries going on in various parts of Japan, we regularly have had speakers from various ministries like Bible translation into Japanese sign language, hiBA (a high school ministry), university campus ministries. For several years the church sent teams to the post-tsunami devastated area of Tohoku.

It’s got its eyes on the rest of the world too. The church supports ministry and missionaries in other countries. It supports a school for disabled and abandoned kids in the Philippines. Missionaries in countries such as Taiwan and Turkey have spoken at church and the church supports overseas missionaries. I’m not sure how many (to say I find reading the finance report a bit difficult is an understatement), but it seems that we often have a guest here saying thank you for supporting our ministry.

It does all of this, while at the same time working hard to pay off the debt of the small block of land next to it that it bought in the last couple of years. But that hasn’t stopped it looking outwards.

Yesterday we were blessed with a guest speaker from Wycliffe. The speaker was not a translator with Wycliffe, he was a teacher of the kids of missionaries in Papua New Guinea.

It was amazing to hear the parallels of this family’s story to ours. Actually, I have worked with the wife at CAJ’s Thrift Shop, but hadn’t heard much of their story. The husband was called to ministry when he did a short-term mission trip to Indonesia (we also did a trip there in our early 20s). He was felt specifically called to teach missionary kids, as was my husband. They first went to Papua New Guinea from Japan in 1999, just a year before we went from Australia to Japan. He still feels passionate about the education of missionary kids, despite being called back to Japan to head up Wycliffe’s sending branch here.

I’m thankful to be a part of such a church. Oftentimes I struggle to feel a part of it at all. My language skills hold me back from knowing more people and what’s going on. But it’s a blessing that we can be present every week. There is a love there that goes beyond the spoken. I love standing on the sidelines and seeing what this church is involved in and quietly thanking God that his name is glorified in this place.

It’s good for us during the summer to go to more rural and remote places and worship in other churches, to catch a glimpse of how it is to be a part of smaller churches. But I continue to be encouraged that, in this country where the chance that you will meet a Christian is less than one in a hundred people, there are mature churches and mature believers. Churches and believers, that though they are seriously in the minority in this land, continue to draw their strength from God. They haven’t collapsed in the face of the enormity of the task and they aren’t looking inwards. It’s terribly encouraging.

Boys and hygiene update

On Thursday I was amused to find this blog post about hygiene and my boys come up in my "on this day" Facebook feed. It's from six years ago.

Our shower. What's not shown is the deep Japanese-style bath.

For all who are still at the elementary-middle school (or younger) stage of parenting and trying to teach their kids about hygiene. I'm hear to briefly tell you there is hope, we have a light at the end of the tunnel here. 

Over the years I've learned that there are personality, not just gender issues involved. Some people are just more pedantic than others. And it also takes longer for some kids to get it than other.

I read the above post to our middle son (who turns 15 this month) and he was horrified, especially at the bit about "not washing hands". Thankfully I rarely now have to tell my boys to wash their hands (the youngest is 12). 

We still have battles sometimes about showers: getting in and getting out (at after a reasonable length of time). Sport really helps us here. Generally when they come home after training they jump straight in the shower, especially the older two.

Teeth cleaning I also rarely have to insist on, though I suspect at least one boy of often not brushing at night time.

It wasn't mentioned in the post above, but we've had trouble in the past with boys wearing their clothes for multiple days before putting them in the wash. Those days seem to be over. Two of them are now washing their own clothes, that in itself seems to have raised their awareness of how clean their clothes are, now many clothes they need in their wardrobe to keep themselves from having to wash too often (which in turn has motivated them to be slightly happier about clothes shopping), and has become something of a badge of honour when they reach high school (when we've enforced this rule). We still wash sports clothes with the rest of the washing (which is down to just three of us, plus sheets and towels, a significant change).

Hair washing and using soap, I don't supervise anymore, obviously, but I think it happens.

Nose blowing can be an issue, but generally because they get lazy and would rather sniff! Drives me insane if they're in the same room as me and I usually lose it after a while.

But in generally we're getting there. It's been a long haul, and one I didn't understand would be so long when we started our family more than 18 years ago. Probably it's good I didn't know!

Waiting

I'm rather an impatient person and have a streak of impulsiveness in me. That's not such a good admission to make. Though God's been working on me over the years. 

One of the biggest things we've had to wait for was permission to come to Japan as missionaries. That story involved nearly three years of waiting. Though I know people wait far longer than that for things, but in the midst, it felt like a very long time, especially when we didn't know the end result. During that period our eldest son was born and we had the uncertainty of David quitting his regular employment so that we could focus on preparing for Japan. 

What held back our permission was a lack of promised finance. But I think that God was preparing our hearts too. If he'd allowed us to go to Japan quickly, we wouldn't have learnt to rely on him quite so much. And we therefore would have struggled more in those early years in Japan when it was really hard to be here. In the waiting and the leaning on God, we got confirmation that this is truly where he wants us. We also gained spiritual "muscle". Nothing like having to trust in the midst of big uncertainty to develop that.

What we're particularly waiting on now is answers about what our son will be studying next year. I guess our expectations have changed. When we were students, it was just accepted that you didn't know your tertiary entrance score until nearly Christmas and then you didn't know what you got accepted into until mid-January, only about five weeks before university started. 

I look at it now and am a bit shocked at how little time there is between finding out what you're accepted into and when you start. But that is only because we've been living in an environment where our son's classmates knew a long time before graduation where they'd be going to college (conditional on good results, though I'm not sure how this works). I guess it is also a factor of our lifestyle that makes that shortness of time shocking. We can't just drive down the road to the uni, we've got to book flights . . . thankfully he's applied to universities all in the same area and our best guess is that he'll get into one of the courses there. We also tend to be planners. We like to plan things out a fair way ahead of time, especially big things, so that makes the unknownness of this a little challenging. Though it's not really that big a deal. We're going ahead planning anyway—even though we don't know the details of what—we at least know when and where (i.e. Brisbane) and accomodation has been sorted.

Soon we'll head into the pre-home assignment wait too. When we're looking at finding accommodation and transport for our months in Brisbane. More waiting. More leaning into God. (Here's another post I wrote about waiting and it's value.)

But big or small waiting (waiting for news about holiday accomodation that you want to book can be hard)—it's challenging and an opportunity to grow.

I was sparked to write about waiting by a post I saw on Velvet Ashes called High Speed Waiting. I do recommend you go and take a peek at it. It's much nicer writing than mine has been today. 

Brain like mush

My brain feels like mush, the headache doesn't help. These last couple of weeks have been more highly pressured than I like. I'm going to write down some of the things I've been doing so that I can get a handle on what exactly I've been stressed about.

As sometimes happens, several unrelated things all collide at the same time. So in recent weeks I've been:

• finishing up the editing of the Autumn issue of the magazine (20+ articles) I manage so that I could hand it over to the designers
• walking through the design/proofreading stage of the same magazine issue (which means answering questions from my proofreading/design team and making final decisions)
• acquiring articles for the Winter magazine, which has involved lots of email as I communicate with and chase people
• writing two of the articles myself (the Good writing column that I've been doing for five years now and the editorial)
• organised who (in my team of six editors) is doing what in the editing phase of the Winter magazine (see something of how that happens here)
• organising the publication of a greeting card for OMF (surprisingly complicated when you are printing it in three languages and have multiple people with multiple ideas of what it should say)
• continuing to oversee the start-up of a blog and become an administrator of a new Facebook page (it's called OMF Japan), which has also involved acquisition of articles, editing them, finding photos to go with them, etc.
• the new website went off-line for several days around the weekend, which curtailed my work on that for a bit, but also put things behind a little (I have about 40 former posts to do formatting etc. on)
• I also discovered, a bit late, that in the updating of the website at the beginning of August, we lost an important link: Contact Us. Well, we didn't actually lose it. People were still contacting us, I just wasn't getting their emails: several dozen were located, but I haven't managed to reply to even a dozen yet
• I wrote and sent out our monthly prayer/newsletter and today have made a start on our quarterly kids one

In the midst of all this intense desk-work I've changed my workstation, which hasn't been easy either. It began with a "new" desk, something I've been needing for a while now, one that gives me more space in my little corner of the dining room. Alas this catapulted into needing a new keyboard and mouse to keep me from getting muscle aches and pains from a non-ergonomic set-up. That wasn't so easy because it turns out that I need to try a keyboard out at home before I buy one, but you aren't allowed to do that. I've also not used a mouse regularly for many, many years. So, now we have a spare barely-used (non-Mac, Japanese) keyboard for sale if you're interested.

Yep, looking back at the 211 emails I've written since August 28 (first full day of school) and 111 just this week, I think that covers the majority of what I've been dealing with.

But I'm badly in need of some exercise and have struggled to fit that into my weeks, with all these things pressing down on me. Thankfully I've had a couple of "coffee" times with friends and been able to download a bit on them.

The other thing that presses on me right now is that I'm going away to a workshop in Manila on Sunday (as I wrote about here). I'm looking forward to it, but know that the travel will be tiring and I will not have much time to get to my other responsibilities, so I am trying to do what I can before I go away.

It's amazing at times like this when a small thing can pick you up. Yesterday, I received this message mid-afternoon:

Hi Wendy!

Just wanted to say that I read your blog from time to time and really enjoy it. I'm amazed that you write so often while managing to share something of value to other people, plus keeping it concise. Please keep sharing your posts

What an encouragement! Not just that, but this lady is an editor and had some time available to take on a couple of small jobs for me. Just knowing that she could do that took a little bit of the load off.

I'm not cooking dinner tonight! It's our 18 year old's turn. So I guess I can relax a bit later this afternoon. I'm looking forward to another episode of NCIS this evening (David and my current evening entertainment) and also to finishing my latest Baldacci thriller in bed this evening. So life isn't really that bad, just a bit extra pressed than usual. I keep reminding myself: this too will pass. I certainly hope this headache does!

Vegetable Nut Crumble recipe

Last night I baked a vegetarian dish that I found when I was a poor newly wed. I haven't made it, as far as I can recall, since we've had kids. But I brushed the cobwebs off the recipe last night and made it. 

Everyone liked it, except for the fact that I added capsicum. But they're big enough that they don't really complain anymore, though I have plenty of immediate feedback. One boy jokingly called it a "sand casserole" because it looked a bit sandy on top! Two of them just picked out the capsicum and left it on the side of their plates. In any case, you can play around with what vegetables you wish to include in this dish. I didn't use cauliflower, merely because I didn't find it in the two shops I looked in. I used corn instead.

I posted about it on Facebook, and as usual, someone asked for the recipe, so here it is. It's not a hard recipe at all.

Rice base

I used three rice-cooker cups of rice for this (about 180ml). But adjust to your size family.

Vegetable stock cube

2 eggs

1. Cook rice in water with stock cube. (I used a rice cooker)

2. Combine rice and raw egg, mix well.

3. Spread over base of baking dish (I used a large dish for my hungry family).

Vegetable layer

50g butter

1 onion, chopped

1 capsicum (bell pepper/red pepper), chopped

broccoli (I used about 300g), chopped

200g cauliflower (I used about 150g corn), chopped

150g small mushrooms, chopped

1 can tomatoes, mashed

mixed herbs (whatever you've got, Italian-type herbs)

pepper

1 - 1 ½ cups grated cheese

4. Melt butter in frying pan.

5. Add onion, cook until soft.

6. Add rest of vegetables and cook until tender.

7. Add herbs and pepper.

8. Spoon vegetables over rice.

9. Spread cheese over vegetables.

Nutty Crumb topping

20g butter, melted

1 cup breadcrumbs

1 ½ cup mixed nuts, chopped (I used ½ cup of almond powder)

10. Mix together topping.

11. Spread evenly over everything else.

12. Bake in a moderate oven (about 180˚C) for 20 minutes, or until golden.

Enjoy!

Family traditions

One of the hazards of being an editor of non-fiction is that you have to delve deeply into work that you may or may not agree with, but also deal with articles (or books if that is what you edit) that are convicting and persuasive. It gets me in that vulnerable area of negatively comparing myself with others.

So the other day I read through the rough draft of an article about family traditions. It, of course, made me think about our own family traditions: What do we have? Have we made enough of an effort in this area? With our boys now 12, nearly 15, and 18, is it worth starting new traditions?

So, here is a list of the bigger traditions that we do currently have:

• Christmas in Japan
• involves being at home and unwrapping presents after breakfast and morning jobs, 
• food: Christmas morning tea (with home made fruit cake and chocolate balls) and a roast lunch (chicken or turkey).
• in the last few years it has included going to church on Christmas eve night. When we're in Australia we attend church on Christmas morning.
• calling family on Skype or Facebook Messenger
• birthdays
• presents before/during breakfast
• home-made cake (or cheesecake), usually decorated in some way
• use Splayds with the cake for dessert (like sporks, but an Australian brand, given to us for our wedding)
• camping in general has become a tradition
• we've had a tradition of going camping on Thanksgiving, but that might be nixed this year for two reasons: camping in cold weather with summer gear is hard and the snow last year really iced the cake; this year CAJ's Thanksgiving holiday is only one day instead of one and a half days.
• lots of foods have become camping traditions, especially breakfast and dessert are traditions, eg. damper, bacon and eggs. And a new one that we made up ourselves: Biwaza (pizza on damper—which is like soda bread—folded over and cooked on the fire)
• a week's holiday up in the mountains in a mission cabin around Christmas, which has a set of its own traditions. Here's a post about that.
• New Year's Eve with local friends (only a two-year old tradition, but strong enough to affect when we decided to go on holidays this year)
• going out for all-you-can-eat to celebrate the end of a school year
• konbeni lunches when travelling. Is this really a tradition? "konbeni" is Japanese for convenience store and our boys love eating their food. Japanese convenience stores are amazing. I've written about them before, for example, here.
• holding hands and singing grace before meals
• we used to sing at bed-time when reading the Bible and praying with the boys, but this has fallen out of practise as they've gotten older
• reading after meals

So I guess that is a fair list. Most of them aren't fancy traditions and mostly surrounding specific times of the year. I'm not a fussy person and I don't like spending lots of time on decorations. I guess we're also not overtly gushy people. Perhaps that is something of an Australian thing? So a tradition for us is more likely to be something that we do, rather than something we say or write. It also tends to more be centred around spending time with people.

Can you see how most of our traditions are also centred around life in Japan and how that makes Australia not feel quite so much like home? Some traditions are transportable: like camping, birthdays, and reading. Others are just different when we're in Australia: like having at least two Christmases as we travel between our widely spaced extended family.

Writing the list also helped me to realise that there are things that we used to do, but are no longer part of our lives because we're at a different developmental stage with our kids. That's okay too.

This last one on this list was really the reason that I started this post. It's a habit I've been in for many years now (probably at least as long as I've been blogging, and that is over eight years now, see this post) and we've been through many books. Our 18-year-old still loves to listen as long as we choose sufficiently interesting books, which has been challenging over the years, with a six-year gap, but the gap is closing now.

We've just finished this book by an Australian author. It is in the fairy-tale-type genre with a princess on a quest, wizards, magic, and transmogrifications. I was doubtful that it would grab our boys, with a title like that and a young female protagonist. But even I, who is not into this kind of literature, enjoyed the story.

Here's the next one that we started last night. This is a book we studied at high school. I didn't like it then, but want to read it to my boys, knowing that they like genres I don't. It is an "end of the world as we know it" type novel. Another compelling reason to read it to them is that most Americans have never heard of it, I'm a little strange, I know! I like introducing my boys to something from my Australian youth that they will probably not come across except through us.

Do you struggle with traditions? Do you find it hard not to negatively compare yourself to others who appear to do so much more? My advice would be to sit down and write a list of  things that you do regularly and look forward to. Be encouraged. You don't have to "keep up with the Joneses". The smallest things, like using a special plate at a specific time or even just a hug goodbye at the start of the school day, can be a tradition. Here's an encouragement:

Studies show that happy families not only have treasured traditions, they constantly evolve new ones that help them find their way through the inevitable changes of growing up. But don't worry if you aren't consciously "creating" traditions. Your family is naturally developing them, from Sunday morning pancakes to bedtime blessings. The way you celebrate birthdays or mark anniversaries, the way you say goodbye to each other every morning or shop for fall clothes each school year; anything repeated is a tradition, the stuff of which memories are made. You don't need anything fancy, just love. What creates a tradition is revisiting it year after year, updating as your child gets older. (from here)

Phew, this turned into a much bigger post than I'd planned. I'd better stop here. If you'd like to share some of your less elaborate traditions, please do. (I think the elaborate traditions are great, if you have the energy and inspiration, but aren't necessarily inspiring to others who don't.)