At the beginning of February I went on a five day trip with our middle school students to an area called Bataan. We spend five days traveling all over this peninsula across from the nation’s capital city, Manila. Our main purpose was to allow the students to see many of the landmarks of this area so enriched with World War II history. On Monday, we took our six hour bus ride and we made two stops on that day. The first stop was as Camp O’Donnell, where the infamous Bataan Death March ended at a Japanese occupied military camp. At this stop we were able to tour the grounds of the camp where both Filipino and American soldiers were kept as prisoners. Our second stop was to see a memorial at the site of a very fierce four month battle that took place between the Japanese and American/Filipino troops and it was at this place that the Bataan Death March began. The march was about 90km (56 miles).
We got to our “base camp” later that afternoon and groups began to get ready for the week’s activities. Our school was mixed in with two other missionary schools. On Tuesday, my travel group left base camp for our beach stop. As much as it may sound like a relaxing trip, it was not very relaxing at all. We arrived at the place we would be staying for the night and began our daily activities. We started with a huge station game activity. Students were required to go to stations and perform a task to receive a ticket. When you collected enough tickets you could trade them in for puzzle pieces to the answer to a riddle. The afternoon consisted of a trip to a turtle reservation where the students learned about the types of turtles and were able to weigh and measure some new hatchlings. They also were allowed to release the hatchlings at the end of the day.
Wednesday saw us traveling to a small island off the coast of the peninsula named Corregidor. This was a very important US held island that provided the land to sea protection of Manila from the time of the Spanish-American War through World War II. This island was General MacAuthor’s base during the Pacific campaign of World War II. At one point the Japanese has conquered the island and held it for close to two years until a joint effort by the Filipinos, American, Australians and others took back the island. We did have a few students find unused ammunition, a teacher found a dog tag, and a student found a brass button from a US uniform.
Thursday was our last day of adventures before we came home. During Thursday morning we played some pool games, adventure games, and we prepared for our ministry trip to a local school. The ministry opportunity allowed us to go to a elementary and high school. Each of our groups was able to go to a classroom, introduce ourselves and share the gospel with them. My group was assigned to a high school classroom which was great for us because many of my students were the same age as those in the class. Many students in the school accepted the message that we had brought to them.
We said goodbye to Bataan on Friday morning. I was very glad I had the opportunity to go on this trip. I was able to bond with many of our students which would not have happened in the classroom. I learned so much about them and it give them an opportunity to see me outside of a school role, too! It was also a place for all of us to live out the things we talk about in Bible class!
-Craig
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| Memorial at Camp O'Donnell |
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| Memorial at Mt. Samat and the beginning of the Bataan Death March |
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| Releasing sea turtles |
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| Mortar at Corregidor |
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| Battery Geary at Corregidor Look this one up on Wikipedia for an interesting story! Battery Geary Article |
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