Baguio: Day 2

After a long day, I was able to sleep for 12 hours and get up feeling ready for day two, or at least that is what I thought when I woke up. We started off the day with a quick breakfast and headed down to the halfway-home.

We met up with our videographers, hopped in the car, and headed out of the city. After about an hour of driving, which was literally twisting and turning at all points of the drive, we arrived at the municipality. In the municipality, I was able to interview one of the administrative workers there and hear how she and her team are providing basic health services to the low-income families in the area.

After finishing up the interview, we all jumped in the car again and continued our journey. After a short time, we arrived at the base of some stairs and piled out of the car. As we made our way up the stairs, you could look down and see that every step is numbered, from 1 to 147. After finishing up my cardio for the week, we arrived at the top and saw a flat green field full of children playing.

We immediately got to work taking photos and videos of everything there, since it was one of the most beautiful areas I have ever seen and which cameras can't do it justice. After a few minutes, we were greeted by the teachers there and brought down to their rest area to have some coffee and cake. With the area being so fertile, many of the fruits, vegetables and other produce was actually just grown and picked around the school.

The coffee we drank was actually a local root (if I recall correctly), that the teachers gather, crush, dry and then boil to turn into the coffee that we were drinking. It was the first time I hadn't had instant coffee for around three weeks, and it was marvelous. In case you missed it, the popular coffee drink over here is instant coffee drinks that taste great, but provide very little caffeine (I usually have three or four while at work just to keep my eyes open).

After interviewing the principal of the school and getting a tour of some of the classrooms, we took some final pictures with the staff and the kids and jumped in the car. Right as we started to drive away, a storm arrived and we snaked our way back home in the pouring rain. Turns out, the area where we were driving was still repairing damage from a mudslide, but fortunately, it wasn't raining hard enough for that to be a concern.

On the way back into the city, we made a short stop at a local orphanage. While there, we were able to hear about the work of the orphanage and the services it is providing to children that are abandoned or rejected, ranging from a few months to a few years old. Unfortunately, it was raining so hard when we were there, that it was impossible to do an interview due to the noise.

Luckily, since our videographers were local to the area, they volunteered to go back to the orphanage and conduct the interview after I go back to Clark. We headed back to SLU, took a break, and transferred all the videos and photos over to our computer and finished up on our journey in the summer capital of the Philippines.