It's Christmas time!!

On Wednesday, November 5th, a group of us from SP hopped into a van and headed into Manila for a shopping area called "Divisoria". Our purpose? TO BUY CHRISTMAS PRESENTS! Yah! With the many donations that SP received from all of YOU, we were able to use those funds and get some amazing presents for the kids both here at Samaritan's Place AND the many kids that come to the outreach, KidzKlub. So, below are a few pictures of that day. Enjoy!

The busy streets of Divisoria. It actually wasn't bad the day and time that we went (we left SP by 6:00 am and arrived to Divisoria around 8:00 am) so we were really thankful for that! Usually, you are squished into a "line" and kinda shuffle through all the stores/stalls.

One of the main intersections in that part of town. Divisoria is interesting because there are shops and stores all through the streets and then there are two huge buildings, filled with stores (think one of the malls is called 168) that are about a block away from each other. So, if you can't find what you want in one place you just keep walking and check out the other.

Here is (L-R) Ruth, Ghie, Gina and MariCris. We all had to continually update our "books" of how much had been spent on each child, how much was left and what we were anticipating spending elsewhere... yes, by the end of the day, all of our minds were exhausted with computing the numbers over and over... but, thank the Lord for calculators!! (-; Those definitely helped keep the confusion to a minimum.

Here is Ruth, MariCris and Dori, outside one of the toy stores we shopped at. It was great because when you buy things in bulk, the vendors would drop the price by a few pesos per piece, so we got some great deals! Especially for me, because I was buying things in bulks of 20 to 80 at a time (for the outreach kids)!! YIKES!

Again, shopping for the kids, but this time we are inside Divisoria. It was really nice because Joe, one of the housefathers, would meet up with us often and get our MANY bags and take them back to the van whenever our arms were full, so we could keep going and shop more. He was pretty exhausted by the end of the day, but we sincerely appreciated his help.

Above, this is all of us with most of the stuff back at Samaritan's Place around 8:30 that night. We got a TON of stuff and we still had/have more to get! WHEW! What a very long, but very FUN day!! WHoooo HOooooooo!

That Friday, we all assembled in Unit 4 and started wrapping the presents. It took us about 4 hours to get everything done and to have the presents all under the trees! Now the kids are all trying to guess which presents are theirs, since we secretly assigned each child a number and marked the presents with those numbers, instead of the child's name. They said it keeps the kids from trying to open their presents early! Oh, the suspense of it all!

A shot of all of us, wrapping the presents. Meca is in the middle of our group thinking, "Hmmm, I wonder which one of these is mine?"

It was a really fun week, full of shopping, wrapping and singing Christmas songs and it is only mid-November! WOW! But the kids and staff alike are so looking forward to Christmas and getting to open the presents that everyone worked so hard to get, so it is all worth it!!

Merry Christmas!!