Today's picture has a story. A couple days ago we visited the home in which Joahnna's mother grew up, with her nine siblings (4 boys, 6 girls). By Philippine standards they were relatively well off, in a small, well-built separate house, with the boys sharing one bedroom, the girls another, and the parents the third bedroom. Surrounding them, however, was a very poor neighborhood, with lots of small shacks built of whatever people can find. Their parents' house is still there, now a girls dormitory, and is still surrounded by the same poor neighborhood.
Their grandmother started a tradition of giving sacks of candy to all the neighborhood children each Christmas, and her children now carry that tradition on. So a few days ago we all created an assembly line to bag up 500 sacks of candy (apparently the number of children has increased over the years). Then we drove to the house, all donned Santa Claus hats, and proceeded to hand out the sacks of candy to the children, or their parents, who had been given slips of paper for each child that morning. You got the number of sacks to match the number of paper slips you had.
Our kids did a little performance as well, there was a little singing, and the festivities wrapped up in about two hours. It was a slightly rainy afternoon and that may have dampened attendance, because only about 450 sacks were claimed. The picture for today shows the children standing in line to get the candy (outside the fence) and the Santa Clauses of our family on the inside, giving it out. In the background you can see some of the nearby housing.
All interesting adventures, giving us a feel for the country, which has a tremendous gap between those fairly well off and the really poor, whose education probably ends somewhere in grade school.
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