Hope you have been having a wonderful summer! School is about to start in England, meantime, the Cebu school year started in earnest about 2 weeks ago. This is the first time for most children to have face-to-face instruction for two full academic years. According to Save the Children, as many as 80% of children learned little or nothing during the school closures. You can read their report here.
We've been following the heatwave that has hit many parts of the UK! Hopefully there's some cooler weather now. Apparently according to some reports, there'll be more hot summers to come!
National Conference
Every couple of years, Youth With A Mission (YWAM)Philippines holds a conference. This conference is an opportunity for the all those involved in the wide range of mission that goes on across the country under the banner of YWAM to come together, worship, get teaching and share knowledge. It's a prized refreshing time for many who work tirelessly, often in remote locations, to meet with other like minded missionaries. We always really enjoy the conferences here and feel very refreshed and invigorated afterwards.
Getting there wasn’t without its challenges – one of which was our flight being changed last minute by the airline from 6am to 11pm, which almost caused us to miss an important immigration appointment in Manila. Praise God that we made it to the conference and to the appointment - someone very kind at the airport was willing to book us on another, earlier flight without any additional charge.
This was an amazing answer to prayer - thank you to all those who responded to the Facebook post for the prayers! God really helped us, especially when it looked like it was impossible! All the requirements have now been completed for our 2 year visa.
Please pray that immigration issues the visa soon, because every month they don’t issue the documents, we have to pay £230 in tourist extension fees!
Getting registered
We are working on getting the charity that we've
founded (4Freedom) registered as an entity here in the Philippines. This is
quite a task, bringing all the necessary information for all the board members
to be scrutinised by the relevant authorities. We have a social worker
processing the documentation right now and will hopefully be 'live' soon. Pray
that they will accept our application, so that we can open a bank account and
start building a fund for the charity.
Peter has been organising prayer walks once a week
in Cordova which is the hotspot for online child trafficking in the world. We
also want to start a monthly online prayer gathering on the first Saturday of
each month at 9am UK time (10am German time). If you would like to join, please
send an email to peterclem@gmail.com and he'll send you
out a link to join.
Please pray for us in this time. Since the
pandemic, we've gained some support and we've lost a major donor. Moving back
to the Philippines has been expensive with new visas and set up costs
(including back to school costs). Please pray for us as we continue to build
this ministry that we will be able to find some more regular supporters for our
personal everyday costs.
