I know you've all been waiting with bated breath. (And if you haven't, you can sling yer 'ook and not tell me.) But I can finally reveal the gigantic, epic, so-long-it-needs-an-intermission post about my trip to the Philippines. (I wrote that before I turned it into a multi-arc post. It's like when we thought
The Hobbit was going to be two movies and were a little incredulous, but then they turned it into three and that was just needlessly excessive.) I can't promise it will always be coherent. (Obviously.) I have a vague idea about how I want to organize it. But we'll just carry on and see how it goes, yeah?
Let's do this.
So me going to the Philippines was a vague notion until it very quickly became a reality. I've been wanting to travel for a while now, and especially to see how T&M is being used in the field. Moreover, as much as I bang on about homeland missionaries being real missionaries (which we are, thank you
very much), there are times when we feel the need to get out of the office and see how the other half live.
But there's a big difference between wanting to go and actually going. Firstly, there's the matter of paying for it. My support account is in the green, but it wouldn't be for long if I went haring off all the time. Second, there aren't many trips that qualify as work-related. For example, I've been wanting to go on the prayer trip to Israel for a couple of years now. But it's not really my field, and they aren't using T&M, so while it's ministry, it would count as more of a personal trip as far as work is concerned. Third, it's time away from doing my job. So I'd have to justify that.
This is an ECC trip, though, and that makes all the difference in the world. There are still expenses, of course, but it's a T&M event, so I'm useful, and everyone else is going, so it's not like I'm missing much in the office. But actually deciding I should go happened over a weekend, so it was a rather quick process.
I still wasn't sure what exactly I was going to be doing there. The title of the event was "Strategic Enhancement Workshop," which is really just a lot of fancy words strung together that happen to spell out SEW. It doesn't really tell you what the purpose is or what you'll be doing. The purpose, it turned out, was to bring together our best users of Train & Multiply. These people have been in the trenches, worked with the material, and figured out how to adapt it to their context. ECC wanted everyone together to see how we could help each other and come up with some best practices to help new users and also address some challenges that we might be facing in the future. As a producer of T&M, my role was to answer some questions about the process and glean from people's comments some ways that we could improve the material and possibly revamp things for different audiences. Plus, I'd get to hear loads of stories from several different fields.
So, on to the trip.
We were scheduled to leave Monday, January 29, at 5:54 in the morning. This prompted an internal debate, namely, what time do we leave for the airport, and should I sleep the night before we leave even if it's just for a couple of hours? Since there were several of us leaving from OMS, the first question was fairly easy to answer. We all decided to head out around 3:30. In the morning. It's way too early. But sacrifices must be made.
As for the second question, I had to take into consideration the travel time and the time difference in the Philippines. I knew we had a couple of long flights in the wings (natch!) and that we'd be 13 hours ahead. I also know that jet lag is a pain, and nothing really prepares you for flip-flopping your schedule. Nevertheless, I decided not to sleep the night before. I probably should have taken a nap, but I can't really sleep on planes, so I knew I needed to be as tired as possible in order to get a bit of kip. So I stayed up reading. And I guess the adrenaline of a trip ahead helped me stay awake. Didn't help me not be a total spaz, though. I get a little dictatorial when I travel. I try to tamp it down, but I'm not great at going with the flow when it comes to international travel. For the record, I did apologize to my traveling companions before we started out.
I was traveling with Paula, Vicki, and Greg. I was also traveling with Brian, but he hadn't arrived yet, and we met up with Dick in Philadelphia. We thought a before photo would be useful. We do look all bright eyed and bushy tailed, don't we?
Yeah, that didn't last very long. Our first flight was to Philadelphia. I've never flown through Philly. I guess it's nice. Nothing really stood out to me as a distinguishing feature from any other airport I've been in. We flew on American, though that really only came into play on the short hops.
That is the first and only shot from the window I got on a plane. I was only in a window seat for that first flight, and really, I'm okay with that. A window seat is nice if it's a short flight or your first flight or you plan to sleep the whole time. It's less nice when you're trying to prevent blood clots in your legs or you have to pee every few hours. No one likes climbing over someone else to get out. I don't mind being the one climbed over as it usually forces me to get up and stretch. It's a personal preference. No disrespect to my window-seaters.
Now, when traveling to Asia, you usually fly in a general westerly direction, right? It just makes sense. Sure, it's a giant ocean under you, but I just think it's closer. Especially when you're in the easternmost part of Asia. I mean, come on. Christopher Columbus went West to get East. Surely we could follow his example.
But no. We flew East.
To Qatar.
Not sure what you've heard about Qatar. But I'm sure most of whatever you've heard has been a little sketchy. More on that later. Here's one thing I know, though. Qatar Airways is really nice. Nice planes. Nice flight crew. Nice food (for airplane fare). Nice entertainment selection (with built-in censoring of swear words and sex scenes). Just all around nice. And do you know the really great thing about flying to Qatar from the United States?
There aren't many people who want to go there. Which meant I had an entire center row to myself. It was beautiful. And on an 11+ hour flight, that's important. This was the flight I really needed to sleep on. And sleep I did. Sort of. Mostly dozing. But it worked well enough that I wasn't a zombie when we arrived in Qatar.
The airport is really nice. Like, really nice. Also, there's a giant bear right in the middle. Propped up against a lamp. I have no idea why.
There are also screens everywhere. Bright screens that could sear your face off if you stood too close.
But we mostly did this. People, if you're traveling abroad, please let me stress to you how important it is to make sure you do two things. First, check your phone service in each country, whether you are just traveling through or you're staying there a while. Connecting to the internet in the airport is not easy. It's also probably monitored in certain places. Know before you go.
Secondly, make sure you have greenlisted these countries with your bank. You don't want to freeze your accounts because you forgot and used your credit card when they can't be sure you authorized it. And if you don't have phone service, when they call to ask, you can't tell them it was actually you.
Not that I did much shopping at this time. No point buying stuff you'll just have to lug through the rest of your trip. More on that later. But I did make a new friend.
This is Boris. If you're ever in the Qatar airport, please say hello. And send me a photo. I need to know he's okay.
Now, the great thing about traveling from Qatar to the Philippines is that, again,
not many people are heading in that direction. So once again, on my nine hour flight (also on Qatar Airways - can't say enough good things about them), I had a row to myself. Except here's where the good entertainment part comes into play. Because at this point, although I've only advanced about six hours into the future in my personal timeline, I was trying to operate on Philippine time. And that meant staying awake. The whole flight.
I'm fairly certain I managed to do it. I watched a lot of movies. But my tether was nearing its end when we finally landed in Manila.
If you've been to Manila, then you will immediately understand that my use of the word
chaos is entirely appropriate. I don't actually remember most of it. I must have made it through immigration and into the country because the next thing I remember is debating whether or not to get some pesos. I'd been assured that credit cards would be fine, and we wouldn't be doing much shopping anyway. So I didn't get any pesos. More on that later.
Then I remember trying to figure out how we were going to get to the hotel. We knew there would be a shuttle on the hour. We weren't sure if we had arrived in time for the next one or if we'd have to wait a whole hour. But then, a bright spot appeared! There, like an oasis in the desert, was Lois Pannabecker. She was in charge of putting the event together, and like the lovely lady she is, she'd basically commandeered the hotel shuttle to come get us.
Seeing as it was around 11 pm when we actually left the airport, I couldn't really tell you much about my first impressions of Manila. I just remember it took at least 30 minutes for us to actually leave the airport complex. And that's not because we were stuck in traffic. That airport is just huge. So many parts to it. It's insane. More on that later.
Our hotel that night was just a quick layover, but it was still quite nice. Here's the lobby:
I know, right? Very swanky. But before you get too excited, here's the view from the window:
There is no shortage of hotels in Manila. There's no shortage of anything in Manila. People, cars, buildings, roads - you name it, they got it. Except green space. That is strictly reserved for Not Manila.
It was not hard to fall asleep that night. I wasn't even really sure what night it was. Maybe Tuesday. Yeah. Tuesday. Because we'd been in transit for about 28 hours and then we gained 13 hours. So we left early Monday morning and arrived late Tuesday. Sleep was definitely not a problem.
On Wednesday, then, we got ready to make the trip north to Tarlac. Miraculously, everyone had arrived mostly on time and in the right place. So we threw all our junk into a greyhound bus and headed out of the city.
Now Tarlac is about 80 miles north of Manila. It's really not that far. It's slightly less than the distance from Indy to Huntington. And yet, it took us 2.5 hours to get there. And I kid you not, more than an hour of that was getting out of Manila.
The map really doesn't do it justice. But no joke, once you're out of Manila, it's smooth sailing to Tarlac.
Along the way, we saw some lovely sights. (Keep in mind that I took these through a bus window, please.)
Honestly, there were times when I couldn't even tell if I had left Indiana. And then a mountain would appear. Definitely not Indiana. It reminded me a lot of Spain, too, actually.
On the way to Tarlac, we were given a survey to complete. On it was a list of challenges facing T&M and dreams we'd like to explore. We had to rank them based on our own preferences and needs. With that done, we were free to eat the lovely lunch the hotel provided (I'm really bad at taking pictures of stuff like that, sorry) and take in the glorious countryside.
Soon, though, we arrived at our new home for the next few days.
I highly recommend the Luisita Microtel. It was brand new. And it was lovely.
I really couldn't have asked for a better place to spend my time in the Philippines. I had all this space to myself. And for an introvert, that is primo real estate. Especially when you're at a conference where you know there will be multiple group projects.
We had some time on Wednesday to relax a bit. I didn't want to take a nap because I wasn't sure I'd wake up again if I fell asleep. (Like, in time for the evening events. Obviously, I didn't think I was going to die.)
We had a welcome service that evening. Not gonna lie, I was fading fast. But I persevered. There was a lovely performance to kick things off.
They were really great. But I couldn't tell you the first thing that Larry talked about that night. I just know he had five points. I know he had five points because I was counting them down. And then when the five points were done, he kept talking. I might as well have been on drugs. When you're that tired, it's almost like having an out of body experience. You just cannot comprehend anything.
I tried to be personable. I really did. But there was no way that any socializing was going to be beneficial to anyone. So I walked back through the frog-filled woods (did I mention those?) from the Aquino Museum. And then I assume I made it back to my room and fell into bed, because I don't remember anything else until the next morning.
And that's where we're ending this one. The next installment will hopefully come soon. But I make no guarantees.
