they call me kEllY ;)

yaaaaa. today was a little NUTS! The girls and I were on our way to some mystery orientation destination whEN our jeepney broke down. The filipinos are sUPEr nice and a few of them starting helping us out. THATs when we noticed their karokE machine across the street! YEEEeeee. I sang American Pie aaand then, got up enough courage to sing Since You've Been Gone (my FAVourite, by Kelly Clarkson!) Things are RIdiculously chEAp here. It was 3 pesos to sing a song, which is $0.06 american dollars, CRAZY huh?! And, we all went out for Thai food yesterday - ELEVEN ppl ate for $40, when what like 2 ppl could eat for that at Sahla Thai. We had our orientation on 'the poor' this morning, which opened my eyes even more to what the heck these people go without. The crazy thing is they're ALways smiling, even if their completely broken inside. We have a long row of squatters just down the street from us, on the canal [picture below, just a couple of homes, taken from across the street]

and there MIGHT possIBLY be an opportunity to go live among them for 1-2 weeks, just for the experience, sleeping where they sleep, eating what they provide...sUper scary, but it would definetly change me...buuuut, i'll let ya know if that'll actually go through. Gary, one of the directors here, threw out some statistic like within some 1.2 square mile area, there are 16, 000 filipinos living. I know that I haven't even been exposed to 1/10th of what it must be like.