Let The Games Begin... The Tears Might Come With Them

Yesterday.... We had our cultural exchange and it was a great celebration!  Performances, games, laughter.  What everyone loves to have!  They were Filipino games... what ever that means.  There were four games and they were hilarious.  Eat What You Get, which as you can tell from the name, whatever is on your chair you have to eat it!  I felt so bad for one of the kids, he had to eat these weird purple eggs (which apparently are disgusting) plus a tub of butter!!!  I felt so bad for him.  He ate it almost like it was nothing, well almost puking three or four times.... Anyway, then climb the pole.  It was about a fourteen foot tall bamboo pole covered in lard!  We had teams of 9 to get to the top.  Can you guess where I was?  I was the base, and all the little kids were climbing on top of me and stepping on my head, and it was just crazy!!!!  But hey we won!!! That's all that matters!  Plus chasing the pig!! Although we ran out of lard so it wasn't greased but still a little difficult to catch!  We had two to catch and Cici Topham caught one and Alena Cloward the other!  It was really cool.  After that we had one last game!  It was a carrying game where we were assigned numbers and depending on the order of the numbers called, depended on whether you carried or were carried!  It was so funny!  All in all, great day!

Today, it was our last day at the schools and all we did was just hang out, have lunch, and say goodbyes.  I had to comfort a lot of little girls trying to get them to stop crying... It was really sad and I had to get lots of pictures with them!  Before we got there, all the kids made notes to all of us and so I literally have a stack of notes.  Kids wanted me to promise to get back, but we all knew we couldn't do that.  Although, I told them I will keep in touch with them with email and FaceBook!  Luckily we have technology and they have internet cafes!  Haha... Although when I told them I couldn't come back next year, that made a few of them cry... It was a sad day, and I wish we didn't have to leave. But It's good for us to leave... Although, I think today was the first time I had cried for an actual sad reason in years...

Well let's go to Boracay!!!

-Austin Anderson

This isn't anything, at one point I had five on top of me, but they were stepping on my head if you can't tell!  Haha