July 2002

Dear Church Kids,

My mommy told me that you would have vacation Bible school very soon. I wanted to write some stories for you about the things I do here in the Philippines. I hope you like them. I would like to hear stories about what you do too.

Love, Rachie.

My House

I like my house. I like my house very, very much. It is very beautiful too. In the front of my house I have a swing and a douyan. A douyan is a big basket hammock. I love to swing in the douyan. My mommy sings, "Rock a bye baby" to me when she swings me in it. But I am not a baby. I am 6½ years old. My friends and I swing very high and very fast in it. Sometimes 3 of us are in it together. My daddy is always afraid that we are going to tip over and fall out. But we don’t. We just swing and scream a little when we get too high.

In the back of my house we have many animal pens. We have chickens and ducks and rabbits and turkeys and guinea fowl and goats. We have mommies and daddies and lots of babies. I like the babies the best. We also have a dog and cats. I’ll tell you stories about them later.

I like my room. I have a little cupboard with shelves for all my toys. My neighbors Anne Anne and Eulysis live down in the bottom floor of our house instead of across the road. This is very good because I can just go downstairs to play with them instead of going across the road. If I did that I would have to get out my umbrella and then I would get very, very, very wet.

Mae Mae

I have another friend who does not live in the same house as I do. Her name is Mae Mae. She is a big girl who is 9 years old. When we are together, we play Barbies. I have lots of Barbies, and she has 3 Barbies so we always have Barbie parties. We also sing silly, silly songs together.

When my mother rabbits had babies for the first time, they had white rabbits and brown rabbits and grey rabbits. We gave one white rabbit to Mae Mae and I got to keep one of the grey rabbits. My rabbit is named Twinkle Star because she has a white dot on her forehead that looks like a star. Mae Mae named her rabbit Peach Blossom. Soon Peach Blossom was big enough to leave her mama and go to Mae Mae’s house. But she was all alone and was Hawawa, a poor thing. She hardly ate at all. So I decided it would be a good idea if Twinkle Star went to live with Peach Blossom. Now they are together and they are both happy and are bouncing and bouncing around the cage.

Baby Goats Don’t Belong on the Breakfast Table

Did you know that I have a baby goat? His name is Henry. I first saw Henry when he was one day old. He let me hold him on my lap and sucked my finger. He said, "Where’s that milk. I know there is milk in here somewhere."

But there wasn’t. Silly goat. There is no milk in my finger.

When he came to live at our house with his mama, Henry liked to jump and climb trees. He climbed my favorite tree. My favorite tree is a mango tree. There will be a tree house in my tree soon, but now there are only steps up to the branches that I like to climb. One day I was going outside to eat my breakfast on the porch and then I saw Henry coming and he jumped up on the breakfast table. And I had to keep pushing him and pushing him and pushing him off the table, but whenever he was down he jumped back on again. So I had to eat my breakfast inside. My mommy said that baby goats do not belong on the breakfast table. Since then Henry has been tied up. It is sad for Henry. He isn’t near his mama all day. At night, they are together in their house and he can still drink her milk. Now his horns are almost as big as his mother’s horns. But he is still a cute little goat.

I Play with Little John

Do you know who Little John is? He is a little kitten. My mommy found him at one of the buildings at the seminary. He was a poor little kitty. He was white with one green and one blue eye. Just like Sarah Rose! He looked like he was about to die. My mama could not say, "No." So she picked him up and brought him to me. I was at my teacher Noemi’s house and was learning how to read Tagalog. We gave him some food right away. He sure was hungry. Then we took him home.

At first the other cats, Sarah Rose and Tommy Boy, did not like him. They spit and hissed and fahhed at the poor little skinny baby. He was scared, but he just kept on eating and then he cuddled up with me. He grew nice and fat.

In the meantime Sarah Rose had babies. She had two babies and is a very good mama. She nurses them all the time and they have round little tummies and do not cry at all. Do you know what else is great? Sarah Rose has adopted Little John. She now lets Little John nurse too. He nurses right along with her own babies. When Sarah Rose leaves the nest, Little John jumps right in and takes care of the newborns. He tries to play with them and cleans them and makes sure they are cuddly warm. He is a terrific Kuya (honored older brother).

Little John is a very special kitty. I play with little John a lot! Do you know what I like to do with Little John the most? I like to put him on my feet and slowly raise him up in the air. I am very careful. As soon as he meows, I lower my feet and put him down. I also like to snuggle him and huggle him and I just can’t get to bed without him! He is so very fuzzy and so very cute and so very, very warm. My Little John!

The Confused Mama Duck

We have two big ducks. A daddy duck named Ducky Doodle and a mommy duck named Ducky Dot. One day we saw that Ducky Dot was laying eggs. When she was finished laying, she had 11 eggs. We were waiting and waiting for the ducklings to hatch. Then we had a big surprise. Do you know what hatched from the mama duck’s eggs? 3 baby chicks. They were not ducks. They did not have duck feet. They did not sound at all like ducks. But the mama duck thought they were her babies and tried to take them to the pond to swim. Silly Mama Duck! Didn’t she know these were not ducklings? We were also surprised! Do you know what had happened? My Aunty Josie had put some chicken eggs with the duck eggs so that they would hatch. And they did. But the mama duck was very confused. She thought her babies had hatched and did not want to go back to her nest to sit on the rest of her eggs. It is a good thing she did though. In one more week her own ducklings hatched. But the Ducky Dot still missed her first babies. She was not a good mama at all to her own babies. And those babies thought the mama turkey was their "real" mama. My goodness!

The Naughty Daddy Duck

Now let me tell you a story about the naughty daddy duck. One day Ducky Doodle escaped out of his pen. He was following our neighbor’s pretty white duck named Snow White. He did not want to stay in the pen with Ducky Dot and his ducklings. Oh No! He wanted to stay with Snow White. Naughty Daddy Duck! Do you know what we did? We shooed Ducky Doodle and Snow White into our pen. It sounds easy, but it wasn’t. They did not want to be separated and did not want to go back. My mommy sure looked funny running around behind the ducks that scooted this way and that way and this way again. Finally, we got them in. Then we told our neighbor that Snow White could live in our yard so that Ducky Doodle would not stray again. Now all the ducks are happy together, especially today when it is raining and raining and raining and raining.

The Baby Rabbit Surprise

It has been raining for days and days and days. It is the rainy season called the "Tag-Ulan,"which means "rainy season." It is so rainy that all the animals are getting soppy dripping wet. The ground is soggy and muddy and squeezy and wet and squashy and squishy and sometimes I get my foot stuck and when I bring it up mud splashes all over my leg. I think you know what I mean. Anyway, my mama decided it would be a good idea to put all the chickens in cages. There was only one problem. We didn’t have so many cages. So she had to put all the rabbits in one cage. They hopped around like crazy because they were not used to being all together.

The next morning we got a big surprise! Not only were the big rabbits in the cage, but there were new itty bitty teeny weeny little baby rabbits. Oh, they were so tiny. And it was so sad because most of them were scratched. My mama called to my Aunty Josie and she came and they rescued the little baby rabbits. They let some chickens out of one of the cages and put the mama rabbit, named Toast, and her new born babies into it.

It was a little sad though. My mama put medicine on all of the baby rabbits’ scratches, but one baby rabbit had been scratched badly. It was so weak, it died. We did try to save it. My mama breathed hot breath on him and rubbed him. We even put him in a little basket and put it under a warm light. But nothing helped. He never moved again, poor thing. So my mama went out into the rain and buried the poor little itty baby next to his brother from the first batch of baby rabbits. I wanted to call him "little cutie cute."

I can tell you some good news though. His brothers and sisters are fine.

My School

Here in the Philippines I start school in June. So I go to school now and am in the first grade. I am 6½ years old because my Birthday is December 19. When school starts it is the beginning of the rainy season when everything gets very, very squishy and wet. I carry an umbrella to school and my raincoat. But it is still very hot.

Last year I was in Prep at the same school where my mommy and daddy teach. It is called Philippine Christian University. The school was just down the street from my house. I could walk every morning. I had lots of friends but it was hard. We had long exams. I went to school in the mornings. My Ate Angie (baby sitter) took me and then she picked me up. I liked Teacher Lisa very much. But we had to stay in our seats and copy from the board a lot. Sometimes my teacher would tap us on the head if we did not pay attention. I did not like that.

This year I go to another school. It is called an international school. It is on another seminary campus. We have blue and white uniforms, but mine has not been made yet so I wear blue dresses and white shirts to school ‘til my uniform is ready. The school starts at 8:00 in the morning and goes ‘til lunch time (12:00). Then we have lunch and play for an hour and then go until 3:15 in the afternoon. My mommy and daddy used to take me to school on jeepneys or buses or we would borrow Tito (Uncle) Kim’s car. My Ate Angie would pick me up from school because Mommy and Daddy were teaching at Union Theological Seminary. Now Daddy takes me in our own car and picks me up too.

Many kids go home for lunch because they live right next to the school. But I stay at school to eat. So do Jolly Ann, from the Philippines, and Helen, from Korea, and a little girl named Cecilia who is from Norway. Mommy comes and sees me at lunch time and has lunch with me. She usually buys her lunch at the seminary store. She buys a lunch with rice and veggies and other stuff, but I get ice cream. I like the kind on a stick that is called a Jelly Jiggle. It is bright green and gooey and wiggly and sort of like Jello Jigglers on a stick. You can wave it back and forth and I do. My mommy says it looks disgusting, but I think it is great. It is the yummiest. I get it every time. Do you get to get ice cream at lunch time?

I like this school. There are only 20 kids in my class and we each have our own desk. We also have our own craft supplies in our own drawer. We do a lot of crafts and we sing. We still have to copy off the board a lot and it is very hard because the Bible verses and other stuff are very long and I write really slowly. I don’t have homework every day like I did last year, but I have to review a lot because school is hard. Especially spelling. I like math the best. That is easy. I also like the Bible stories. We are reading Matthew chapters 13-15 this week. The teacher reads the Bible and then we have to take a test. We are also learning about Moses. Did you know Moses married a lady named Zipporah? I had to remember this for our test. Mommy told me just to remember that her name begins with the same sounds as Zipper. That made it easier. Her daddy’s name was Jethro and he was a priest of Midian. Do you know how I remembered Midian? I have a cousin named Gideon. Mommy said to just remember my cousin’s name and then to put an M on the front instead of a G.

Anyway this is much easier than spelling! I can use my imagination. There is no imagination in spelling. I have to practice spelling all weekend long. I do not like spelling at all. I also have to recopy my board work in big fat letters instead of small squigy ones. Mommy says all the letters should be fat and round. They should have big bellies like Baloo the Bear. They should also walk on the lines instead of jumping and hopping about between the lines. I like them to hop. What about you?

We all talk English in this school. The kids come from so many places that English is what everyone understands the most. The little girl from Norway does not speak English yet so she doesn’t talk to me. She likes to play tag though. And she likes to play tag with Matthew very much. I like the seesaw the best. I think I told you about that in another story. If you want to know anything more about my school, just ask. I am sending you pictures. I hope you like them.

My Friend Jolly Ann

This year I am going to a different school. At my school there are kids from the Philippines, from Norway, from Korea, from Indonesia, from Japan, from Australia, from Africa and from America. At first my mommy or daddy took me to school on Jeepneys. It took 45 minutes from my front door to the school door. Now we have a car. Now it only takes 15 minutes. That is much better.

I have a best friend at my school. Her name is Jolly Ann. Jolly Ann lives in a big house with lots and lots of little kids. She is the oldest sister. She is the "Ate," which means "Honored Older Sister." She has 25 little brothers and sisters. It is hard to believe, but it is true. How would you like to have as many brothers and sisters as that? I like to play with her on the seesaws at my school. When I first came to the school, I was two weeks late. But Jolly Ann was my friend at once. She showed me everything I needed to know and made me feel just like I felt in America. I felt just right. I felt just like I was at home. I would like to teach you a prayer we always say at school. Here it is "Up in heaven, God is listening to every whisper I say. For he loves me and he listens to me when I pray."

The Library at my School

I like the Library at my school. It is very nice. I like the books there. I get to check out one book a week. To check out a book we write our names on two tags. We give one tag to the Librarian and one tag is stuck on to the back of the book. The first book I got out was called, "How Can You Hide a Crocodile." Then I took out a book my mommy had read when she was a little girl. It is called, "A Big Ball of String." I can even read some of it. Now I have "The Ugly Duckling." I wonder what I will get next week. I don’t know, but I’m sure I will like it.

Cows Crossing the Road

One day when I was going to school with my mommy we saw a scary thing. We saw one little cow cross the road in front of lots and lots of cars. We waited a little longer and then we saw more cows cross the road. There were four cows. All of the buses and jeepneys stopped for the cows. Right in the middle of the road! The cows did not seem to mind at all. But we were scared! We thought the cars and the jeepneys and the buses would run over them. We thought there would be an accident. But there wasn’t. Soon our own Jeepney came and we got on. Everything was all right.

Street Kids in Manila

Sometimes I go to Manila with my Mommy and Daddy. We usually go in a bus. It takes a long time because we go very slowly. I like to go to Manila, but I see some sad things there. There are always little children who beg for money. They look like kids who do not have anyone to take care of them. Their clothes look like old dirty rags and they mostly do not have any shoes at all. They sleep on the sidewalk. Sometimes they have a piece of cardboard to lie on, but sometimes they just sleep in the dirt. They are always hungry.

Sunday School

I like my Sunday School. And I like the songs. But sometimes I don’t know the songs very well so I have to practice them. Last Sunday we learned about Jesus and how he healed the blind man. I would not like to be blind. Would you? But I would like to meet Jesus when I go to heaven.

During Church I mostly run around and play with my friends on the outside porch of the church. The church is round and there is a porch all the way around it. Mamas and Daddies with their babies sit on the porch so they can watch their kids during church and hear the service. Sometimes dogs come up and lie on the porch too, but they are not supposed to go into the church.

The IR Kids

I like the IR kids. Do you know who they are? They are kids who had to leave their homes because of a war. There was a lot of shooting and it was dangerous. So they are staying near the Seminary. They have built some beautiful little houses out of bamboo. The kids even have their own school. Every month my mommy and I go to see them and play with them. My mommy has a birthday party for all the kids who have birthdays that month. We bring sweet rolls and juice and presents for each of the kids. We always have a good time. I hope they do too.

The 2002 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 189