Saturday, 2nd October …..

Everything was under control for the seminar. Elmer had sent out invitations to lots of schools and individuals and the teachers of Hope Intervention were passing around the word. Elmer expected between 60 and 70 participants which would have been an extraordinary response considering the short time for putting it together.

When we arrived at 8.30, the hall was packed and people were still rolling in. When the final count was taken, we had 164 participants. Amazing!

Dr Joel Lazaro spoke particularly well and we allowed his time to run over and finished the whole thing only 20 minutes later than we had anticipated. Cherry and Edwin, a Physical Therapist from Hope Intervention, also spoke well and we left the audience asking for more.

During the breaks, children from Hope Intervention performed. It was great to see and illustrated how far children can come with good intervention. I’ve taken the banner advertising the event as a souvenir.

To celebrate, Kit took us all for lunch to the Jollibee franchise that she owns. She certainly has her finger in a number of pies. We had known about Jollibee for a while but discovered this time that she also owns a funeral chapel business.

In the evening we were invited to the 80th birthday of the father of Kit’s daughter-in-law at a Chinese restaurant. Maybe there were 200 people there, at tables of 12 with wonderful food and great entertainment. Of course, there were the expected ‘special numbers’ from grandchildren but there was a trio of men, the Quanco Brothers (?) who were great. As they said, they were senior citizens, but their voices hadn’t been affected by age.

It wasn’t a late night but we’re dreading the packing tomorrow so will probably wake early.