June 20th

Hello everyone!
School has been going well this week. The activity level in my day has come down a few notches, but actually it has been really nice and is allowing me to regain some much needed energy (especially since I will be leaving next week to be a counselor at a camp up in Rizal for 2 weeks, and I'm sure I will need as much energy as possible for that).
Before classes start each day, the kids and teachers and myself have a flag raising ceremony out front of the school (that's what the couple of years picture below are from), and they sing the national anthem, another Filippino pledge, and then pledges to the Bible and the Christian flag (these are in English though). We then have our devotion. One of the kids plays guitar and leads everyone in a song, and then I give the short devotion for the day.
I try to avoid doing a lot of talking, because with all the kids I know that many of the younger ones don't understand as much English as the older kids, so I've tried to make it a little more interactive. This week I am teaching them what I've heard called the 'Roman Road' (the basic Gospel message using all verses from the book of Romans). I think it is going fairly well - I am having them memorize one verse each morning, and then I just give a short meaning of the verse - this seems to be working well.
After devotion I usually head off and I have been working on a PowerPoint presentation for chapel hour on Friday. I will be talking about the fruit of the Spirit - I figured those were concepts that could be broken down into simple enough terms and stories that I should be able to get the point across to most of the kids. It's been somewhat of a challenge, because I usually have a difficult time expressing ideas to children in general, now I not only have that to deal with, but these are children with an even more limited english vocabulary...haha. It'll be alright though.
And then in the afternoons, depending on the day, I teach one or two computer classes. Pretty basic computer stuff, which is good, seeing as how computers are definitely not my strong point! It's good though, it gives me an opportunity to spend time with the kids and get to know their names and talk with them a little.
The couple of other pictures - one is the newest puppy here at Sankey. One of the guys bought it from the neighborhood the other day for 30 pesos (about 75 cents...haha). The reason I put the picture up though, one of the younger boys came up to me and told me that it was an American dog. I looked at him a little confused and asked how he knew that? I don't know if you can see it in the picture, but the puppy has blue eyes - thus making it American! Haha!
The other picture was my latest idea, that didn't work out quite as well as planned. It is a small house gecko on a leash (made of dental floss). Even though I keep it clean, there are several ants in my kitchen upstairs - and the place they really bother me is on the table on which I eat. So I thought...hmm, if only I had something like a watch dog that would eat ants, and that I could keep it on my table. The problem is, dogs don't eat ants, and they're not nearly small enough to keep on a table. But...geckos eat ants, and they would fit on a table. Long story short, Max (that's what I named him - short for Maximus the Enforcer), spent most of the time hiding under a basket that I keep on the table and never ate a single ant. In fact the ants would walk right in front of his face and he was unphased. I only had him for less than a day, and maybe I just wasn't patient enough, but he didn't show much potential, so I released Max back into the wild and am keeping an eye out for a bigger, more energetic and fierce gecko.