Padens in the Philippines

Dear Family, Friends, and Partners, Greetings from a very, very hot Philippines. I just talked to my parents last night who live up in the mountains, they said it is very hot up there too. They’ve never been that hot before so I guess we are not alone. But the Lord is still good. We praise God for a swimming pool nearby. The kids spend much of their time swimming lately. They love to swim. LANGUAGE STUDY Julie is doing great. She has been writing a lot of sentences and stories. Conversation in Tagalog is still a challenge but she is understanding a lot of words now and is using them frequently. In fact, Julie is even correcting me of my usage of words since I only speak and understand simple tagalong. Not understanding and speaking the language is quite frustrating for her but she is making a lot of progress. MINISTRY I am still involved with the church planting ministry of the church we go to. It has been hard to find a Bible study contact lately (someone that is interested in studyin...

To Our Dear Friends, Family, and Supporters, We hope that this e-mail finds you all well! We have been busy but doing ok here in the Philippines. We continue to plug along in Language School and adjustments, and at the same time travel to different places in order to pick out where we will go this next year. I will share more about that below, but I really wanted to share with you some very interesting and disturbing information about The Philippines and its people. This is not the first time, of course, for Gilmer to be here at Easter time and I have even been here once years ago, but this year was new for both of us. We have included pictures and you are probably wondering why I would send such gruesome pictures to all of you! The fact is that, this is life here and is not abnormal at all. In some of the pictures you might see the crowd, notice the children of all ages that are there. Holy Week in The Philippines is probably the most important celebration of the whole year. We were a...