March Prayer Update

Gilmer was at one of the Bible Schools/Seminaries here in Manila when one of the students came up to him. He asked him what PSC was all about, and Gilmer explained that we are a mission organization designed to send out Filipinos as missionaries all over the world. After talking for a while with him, since he was so excited about it, Gilmer asked him what he was studying and the guy said to be a missionary. The problem was that he had never even been on the mission field!

You see that is what we are doing here in the Philippines. Our desire is to take young people on short term missions trips in order for them to have a chance not only to serve God during that trip, but to see if God might be calling "them" to be missionaries. In the States right now there are hundreds of options if you are wanting to go on a missions trip but here in the Philippines there are only a handful of organizations that offer this kind of opportunity.

Please continue to pray with us as we work to make that vision a reality. Even now there are 3-4 teams in the works for this Philippine summer (April and May). One local, down to Mindanao, and the others want to go to Thailand. These are all from different churches and PSC is working with them to train, set-up, and facilitate all that is required to makes these trips possible.

AT HOME

Things are going well in our daily life. Much like you, we are busy with school and homework and some extracurricular activities. People ask different questions all the time about life here in the Philippines. Well... we live much like we did in the States. Our house is comfortable enough and we have been blessed to find a house with a big yard for the kids and the dogs to play. We have a cat, a turtle, and a hamster too. Last week we were even able to install hot water heaters on the wall in the shower so we could have hot showers! Needless to say, this is not how all of the country lives, or even most. At the same time though we feel like we have to be able to be comfortable enough here to be able to stay a LONG time. Four years without a hot shower would be a very long time for me! Which is how I finally talked Gilmer into having them installed! :) So next time you think of us over here know that, no, we are not camping, and yes, we do have a refrigerator and even a microwave! Even if we do have many modern conveniences life here is still drastically different.

I would say that daily living is harder and more stressful for us here than in the States. I guess because we have become use to the conveniences and ease of life that most Americans might not realize they have. After telling story after story to my Mom she said, "Why don't you write some of those things in your blog so others can get a feel of what's different there." So I will attempt to do just that.

Butiki
In our house there are these little lizards that live on the walls and come out at night to catch bugs. Since it's a hot climate we never close our windows and even if we did the house would be far from airtight. We do have screens on the windows to try to keep out the mosquitos but the houses here are certainly not bug proof (or lizard proof). Anyways, we hardly notice our little lizard friends anymore. They make little clicking sounds that are kind of strange until you get use to it. The Butiki are a part of everyday life for the Filipinos. They even make up stories and songs about them.

Fun Driving Stories

When driving in the Philippines you must remember to flash your lights and/or honk your horn when you are changing lanes, turning, etc. This is not offensive or rude here, it's just how everyone drives.

For example. On my way home from taking the kids to school everyday I have to turn left to get to our street. If I waited for a clear road, like you would when turning left in the States, I would never actually get home! So what you do is, flash your lights at on-coming traffic, then stick your nose out into the traffic, then they stop and you can go through!

This is also true for the intersection close to our house. The light is broken. If there is not a policeman directing traffic, you just wait for a minute and then you flash your lights and go ahead and inch out into on-coming traffic. They will eventually stop (especially when you gets your nose in front of their car) and you can move on to conquer the next lane! Now you might be thinking this is no big deal since it must be a small intersection, but this interestion has at least 3 lanes of traffic coming from all directions. I'll just let you imagine the mess it looks like sometimes :)

According to Wikipedia Manila is the most densely populated city in the World. At first I had a hard time believing that but it's according to land mass as well, and I have no trouble believing that looking at how big this city is. So as you can guess living with the 20 million other people in such a small space can be kind of hard at times!! They even have a thing called coding that is enforced so there are not as many cars on the streets everyday. Meaning, depending on the last number of your license plate, you can't drive one day of the week during rush hour traffic. Our "no drive day" is Wednesday so we can't drive into town until after 10am on that day and must not drive after 2pm. Sometimes we don't make it or forget and get a ticket! Deciding about what car to buy has a lot to do with what "no drive day" it has.

On one of the kids vacation days from school we visited Taal Volcano.

Here we are with one of our fellow PSC missionaries on International Day at school. Can you guess what country we are representing?

Remember we use to live in Baguio City doing church planting? Well we did and we still drive the 8 hours up there sometimes to be with them. Here we are at Family Camp with them in February. Hint- we are at the top.

Caleb and Josiah are singing for us with all the other children at camp.

During Family Camp with the church we were blessed to see new members baptized! Here they are before the baptism.

Nhaya singing during her chapel at school. Each class presents a program during the Friday chapels.

This is Caleb's class doing their presentation for Chapel. No, he's not wearing a dress, he's one of Noah's sons.

Since I don't have pictures of Gilmer traveling around and presenting the ministry and training groups for their short term trips, I added this photo of him with Nhaya and Josiah for fun.

Thanks for reading, praying, encouraging, supporting, and just being a blessing to our family.

In His Service,

The Paden Family

P.S. Please remember to read our praises and prayer requests on the right hand side. Also if you would like to keep up with us more frequently we are on facebook and we would love to be your friend.