I was so excited this morning to take off again with the Br. Polycarp Foundation to another school that is part of the BLT program. It wasn't the first time I was in the area where the school was located. I had gone there before when the other group of Americans were here. What was different about yesterday's experience from today's is that the school was bigger, had more students, and a better place to actually cook. I found it very interesting that where they were cooking was right behind the principal's office. I really enjoyed visiting with the parents that were there to cook. To me is shows how much concern they have for their children's health by taking time to share in the cooking. One thing that came up today was that some students had dropped out of the program due to the fact that the parents either didn't want to cook or didn't want to take time out in helping. So I applaude the parents who do the work to help improve the lives of their children. I also got to help out today. I got to squeeze coconut milk out of the chopped up coconut pieces. Talk about a hand work out. It was fun, and it was the first time that I had ever done that. After that I just passed different ingredients to the main cook. Ninoy and I soon set out in getting the mugshots taken care of. As the students took there photos they were then asked to sit down to receive the food. My first thought when I saw the amount of food they received was if it was enough to feed them, but come to find out it was. Some of the children didn't really eat all of there food. Hopefully as they start to eat more of these meals, the will start eating more. After lunch when I was outside with the children entertaining them, I did notice that some of the kids were extremely skinny and they happen to be the ones in the program. Some of the children actually recognized me from Mass at the Benedictine Monastery, which I thought was cool. They were happy to tell me that they were altar servers. I'm glad that I was able to do a lot more today and bring some smiles to the children's faces.
This afternoon I came back to Cor Jesu just for a little while, but then I was out again with some of the team from the Br. Polycarp Foundation. They took me to a river. You might say, oh a river, but this river was really cool. It makes me wish that I could find something like that in Syracuse for meditation time. There is a bridge crossing the river that no four wheel vehicles can cross and it isn't a rope bridge, more of a rope metal bridge instead. Some of the highlights from being at the river was my failed attempt to wade across the water with the strong current which almost ended in an epic fail. Being able to go splash a caribou in the water that was cooling off. I tried to go towards its head, but they warned me against that. It was still cool though, but the icing on the cake of the river trip was right before we left, a few men were walking across on the other side and in the hands of one of the men was a Komodo dragon. At first I thought it was an alligator, but the team said it was a Komodo dragon. I have never seen one out in the wilderness before, maybe the zoo, but this was the real deal. I wish they were closer because I would have loved to have seen it up close.
Looking forward to going back out again tomorrow. I also only have two weeks left.
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