Even though we just landed less than 6 hours ago before this picture was taken, we went right to work sorting out gifts to give the children of El Dorado, a “squatter” village in the city of Paranaque.

We were all asked to bring a minimum of 10 gifts each to give away.  As you can see, most of us when over and above the call of duty.

It was a indescribable feeling seeing all of your gifts on the table.  We never realized how many gifts (books, soccer balls, watches, games, stationary, puzzles, lego, toys, Angry Birds, etc.) we were actually giving.

It’s hard to imagine this all fit in our luggage.

In El Dorado, we’ll be broken up into small groups so we needed to create our own Santa sack with 25 gifts.

Visiting El Dorado will be first service opportunity while in the Philippines.  Now we just need to figure out the best way to communicate with a group of children that don’t know how to speak English.  The planning continues.