The sun shine above all of us.

This past weekend I went home with one of the girls from the hostel. Twice a month, the girls are allowed to visit their homes in the kampungs, or villages. Courtney went with Bernadeth and I went with Shieldry (pronounced Shel-dree). Leaving Courtney for an extended amount of time for the first time since becoming partners-in-crime, I felt like a kid separating from its parents to go to school for the first time! But it was an amazing weekend, for both of us.

Shieldry is an only child which is unusual, since most of the girls have at least two siblings, if not six. Shieldry is also unusual because her mom is the only parent at the hostel who has a university degree (for teaching). Upon meeting her parents, Shieldry's dad told me that he also is in college right now studying education. For an hour on Saturday night, I helped him with an English class project, which included writing sentences using adjectives. Fun stuff! Anyway, Shieldry lives fairly close by, only about thirty minutes away. She technically does not need to stay at the hostel, given her socioeconomic background, but the hostel took her in to help her learn independent living skills and to give her a supportive sisterhood.

I thought it would be fun to give you a glimpse of my weekend through pictures. Here goes!


On Saturday, Shieldry, her mom and I went to her mom's family's kampung, called Kampung Bantayan. Shieldry's grandmother, uncle, uncle's wife, two cousins, and aunt live there. They have a big country house with lots of scruffy dogs and puppies, chickens, pigs, and fruit trees. We went up to the rubber tap trees to collect the rubber. Shieldry's uncle and wife manage the trees. Our girls at the hostels always talk about going home to help their families "rubber tap" so it was really awesome to see it up close and personal. Liquid rubber, which is white in color and looks like glue, literally runs out of the tree into little black pots that are hung on the side of the trees. After collecting the rubber, Shieldry's uncle sells it to a rubber factory. It pays well. In this picture, that's me wearing a borrowed hat from Shieldry's mom, Shieldry's adorable two-year-old cousin Alvin who fell partly down a hill on my watch (oops- but no worries, in no time, he was up and running around the hillside again and playing with a sparrow his dad had shot with an air rifle), Shieldry holding a bucket full of rubber, and Shieldry's five-year-old cousin Melvin who was shy at first but later felt comfortable making faces at me.

This is part of Shieldry's family's rice paddy. Isn't it beautiful? Her grandmother, who is probably in her late fifties or early sixties, goes out every day to work the fields. She's quite a rockstar. Shieldry's aunt took me to four different places in the paddy to find me a leech. They were being shy, so she kept telling me to just stick my leg in. She finally found a baby one.

I like this picture of Shieldry and the kelapa, or coconut, tree (funny because "head" in Malay is "kepala"). We picked a bunch of coconuts and her uncle chopped the tops off as soon as we got back to the house and we had fresh coconut juice!

Hot and sweaty Lara and Melvin enjoying our fresh drinks. Shieldry and her uncle in the background with more coconuts. After finishing the juice, Shieldry's uncle chopped them open again to see if there was any coconut meat. I also had two other vegetables from their farm. One was called tarap and was delicious in a soup - kind of reminded me of mushrooms. The other was a bitter root that they like to chew and wasn't quite my cup of tea - don't remember what it was called.

Every Sunday, Shieldry's mom's family gets together for family prayer and dinner. Lovely. In the back row: Shieldry's uncle Augustine, dad Yalim, uncle Richard (covered by camera loving Alvin), aunt Sabrina, Shieldry, mom Susannah. In the front row: Shieldry's uncle Didie (who is twenty four years old and took us to a crocodile farm!) cousin Melvin, uncle's wife Meg, cousin Alvin, grandma Lina, uncle Lawrence, me, uncle Lawrence's wife with seven-month-old Grace.

They did their prayer in Malay, so I didn't understand much else besides "Yesus". But what I did understand was the love in that family. I had met everyone by that time Sunday night (yesterday night!), but it was only in seeing them all together in Shieldry's house that I started to think about my own family. Shieldry's mom's family now consists of her grandmother the matriarch (grandpa passed away about five years ago), four brothers, and two sisters - and their extended family. Being invited into their family and feeling that family love, I began to miss my dad's family, which consists of the same grandmother matriarch, four brothers, two sisters, and all the husbands and wives and cousins.

"Family" means a lot of different things. But realizing the similarities between my own and Shieldry's made me so grateful for family and everything that it means. I was so overwhelmed with love, with homesickness, with joy, with gratitude, that I started crying. I felt very much at home with Shieldry's family and I am so honored to have gotten to know them. I hope very much that I get to stay with them again!

On the first night of my stay, Shieldry's mom was showing me family photo albums and came across one with breathtaking photos from Mount Kinabalu that Shieldry's uncle Didie had taken. The most amazing thing, however, was that Shieldry's ten-year-old self had decided on her own to write little blurbs on the backs of the photos. Of course, I was obsessed with them. Among my favorites: "Natural things help us relax and teach us to calm down with all what happen whenever it bad or good" and "The wild is my way to heaven." She also wrote, "The sun shine above all of us. Greet him nicely." Some months ago, my dad told me that sometimes he looks at the moon and thinks, Andrew is looking at the same moon. Shieldry's ten-year-old self was/is so wise. The sun does indeed, shine on all of us. What more could we ask for?