So we flew on a jet plane north to Tuguegarao (it’s just as much fun to say as it is to spell)
This is the face of how Hannah and I feel about May. It’s a no good terrible rotten time. Too much change, too many goodbyes, beginning a love hate/relationship with skype. But that is the life we lead, it is the nature of the expat/missionary life. When you venture to a place far away from the home and people you grew up with the world suddenly becomes a much bigger place. You can’t unmeet people and forget that life is going on without you in each new place anymore than you can forget that life goes on in the place you grew up, went to school, church etc. Sometimes I’m like whhhhy did I open that door? I cannot shove it shut! I cannot forget you people! But then I recognize that it’s only such a painful experience because it’s such a great experience. In the end, your world gets smaller because your friends begin to populate the areas between you and the people you love that are furthest from you. I could just play hopscotch across the globe and find pieces of my heart that were stolen from me (okay okay, I gave them willingly). Anyway, you get the idea.
This post is hard for me to write. Mostly because it’s hard to describe the experience with words. For those of you know the kind of experience I had with my senior theatre project at Cedarville then you understand exactly the kind of emotions, awe, and wonder that this production evoked. It truly was a midsummer night’s dream. NOT intentionally PUNNY! (The hot season in the Phils or summer is from from March to May. Our play was April 24-26. :o) The great thing about Shakespeare is that it a blank canvas, you can do whatever you want with it. But I’ve come to realize that the blank canvas can also be TOTALLY overwhelming when you aren’t an abstract thinker. Thankfully, I had willing people around me who stepped up to help brainstorm, design, choreograph, buy fabric, paint, sew, and tell me the ideas I did have weren’t crazy (even when they were). I felt like the luckiest director in the world as I sat in the audience and watched our creation come to life.
The 2013 Bohol earthquake occurred on October 15, 2013, at 8:12 a.m. (PST) in Bohol, an island province located in Central Visayas, Philippines. The magnitude of the earthquake at the epicenter was recorded at Mw 7.2, located 6 kilometres (3.7 mi) SW of Sagbayan town, at a depth of 12 kilometres (7.5 mi). It affected the whole Central Visayas region, particularly Bohol and Cebu. The quake was felt in the whole Visayas area and as far as Masbate island in the north and Cotabato provinces in southern Mindanao. According to official reports by the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC), 222 were reported dead, 8 were missing, and 976 people were injured.
When I got back to Faith last August I had just had a whirlwind of a summer with no real time for reading plays. So, I began my frantic search for a script that would meet my ultimate goal of “display the talents of this particular group of kids.” Finding scripts is a daunting task. For me as a director it is absolutely the WORST part of the process of producing a play. We aren’t auditioning the world here only our world and that does limit what’s available to us. Sometimes content limits script use particularly when copyrights do not allow for editing. Sometimes the set or costumes or music limits us because what is needed is too elaborate for what we can accomplish. Sometimes we don’t have the right number of males vs females. And sometimes, frustratingly, we are unable to obtain the rights to produce a show because we are outside of America. I find this to be the silliest of all reasons. So sometimes you settle for something you aren’t totally thrilled with but figure you can make work and the process of making it something everyone involved will be thrilled with begins.
A busy life, outdated website software, and getting hacked are all major contrubuting factors to my lack of updates. We’ll just leave it at that. Thanks to one of my besties, Ben Daron, my site is back up and running. I hope to continue getting it up-to-date, but you know me (or maybe you don’t), no promises! 😉