Brian and Bailey Pruett Serving in the Philippines with Aviation
Today is my true 30th birthday and the first time in 23 years that I have celebrated it on the proper day! It is true that I was born on June 23rd, but I was born on the 23rd in Makati, Philippines, not in the United States. How awesome is it that this year I get to celebrate after only waiting 364 short days! (more…)
It has been a whirlwind of a first year for Maycie! She has already lived in 7 different homes, traveled to 3 states and lived in 2 countries. She even has her own missionary visa for the Philippines! She knows how to play peek-a-boo in two different languages and we are just waiting to find out how many other things she can do in two languages! She has way more Filipino friends than we do and is practicing her walking so she can play outside with all of them. (more…)
We just had our first language evaluation and it went really well! We were asked a series of questions that got progressively harder and we had to answer completely in Tagalog! At the end, leadership determined what level of fluency we are. Both of us have made it to level 5 which is beyond what we expected to get. Praise the Lord for how He is seeing us through! By the end of language study Brian must be at level 7 and Bailey at level 5 – which means she has already made it! Hooray! She still must finish the program, but without the pressure of reaching her required level. Thank you Lord! Please continue to pray with us for diligence and motivation as it is REALLY easy to become side-tracked.
Please pray with us for Bailey’s sister, Jessie as she is in labor with her second son as I write! It is 11:15 PM in California on Wednesday night right now. Please pray for healthy and fast delivery and that Baby Tanner and Jessie would recover quickly.
Christmas IS coming and a lot has happened since we last asked you to pray! We have moved back into the Manila Guest House, then into a new apartment (which we absolutely love), Maycie has started crawling, Thanksgiving came and left, and now it’s December and Christmas is rapidly approaching! Praise God with us for seeing us through our apartment trials, for giving us a family here to spend Thanksgiving with, for a healthy, happy baby girl, and for a needed break coming up after next week!
No, not really…but we do feel like we’d like to drop out every now and then! Please pray for us and we begin to feel a bit overwhelmed with how much we have learned and have yet to learn. Before we started school, a year and a half seemed like a long time to be studying a language, but the more we are exposed to it, the more it seems like not nearly enough time. Please pray for patience as we get frustrated when we can’t speak correctly, diligence in our studies as it is so easy to get sidetracked, and rest as without it, we are useless!
Praise God with us for our first visitors! We are so thrilled that Brian’s mom and dad will be with us for Christmas this year. Although it will still feel a bit sad to not be with the rest of our family, it will be comforting to have them here. Please pray for a safe, uneventful trip here on the 23rd.
A couple of months ago it became clear to us that the apartment we were staying in was causing Maycie to get sick. There was a leak from the outside of the building whenever it rained that was in the process of being repaired when we moved it. However, due to the rainy season they was decided to fix the water leak when it wasn’t so rainy. This delay meant that we would have to stay there until March before repairs would resume. Maycie was very sick so we were unable to wait for that to happen. It was a tough decision and a very difficult process, but we decided to move, again.
We began the search for a new place all over again and discovered that the apartment across the hall from us was available and the leaks had already been repaired there. We started to get our hopes up for this new apartment but the rent was quite a bit higher than what were already paying. We negotiated a little with the landlord, and decided it was close enough to our budget to take a look. As we walked into the apartment we all had the same kind of reaction that they have on "Extreme Makeover." It was a beautiful apartment that needed absolutely no repairs. It was clean, freshly remodeled and already had a lot of basic furnishings. In the States we take for granted that an apartment comes with things like light bulbs, shelves, cupboards, sinks etc. The landlords even paint before you move in to make sure the place is presentable and to try to "sell" it to you.
They look at it very differently here, and apartments are usually shown to future renters in the same condition they were in when the last tenant moved out, cockroaches and all. So you can imagine how excited we were to find one that needed some very basic cleaning and nothing else! It was worth a little extra money to forgo the weeks of hassles and remodeling to move directly across the hall. So that is what we did.
Thank you so much for your prayers regarding this move. We had some help moving so it took us only 2.5 hours to move. We never had to pack a single box or crate. We just carried it from room to the next. We have been here for just over a month now and it is a VERY nice apartment. Also, we have all been free from mold symptoms since we moved. God is so good.
Praise the Lord! We moved into our apartment last Saturday and are loving our own space again! We had been living out of suitcases for 5 1/2 months, so we were ready to move in!
Please pray for us tonight during our meeting with the landlord to discuss repairs and sign the rental agreement. Once we are done with the contract, we can schedule the work to be accomplished. We are hoping to have it completed in the next week or two. We are just thankful to be able to move forward again now that Ghost Month is over.
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