20 years in Davao
July 20, 2010 was a significant date because it marked my 20th year of living in Davao City. Almost half of my life has been spent in a land that adopted me as its own; Davao has been good to me even though I, like many other Manileños, had pretty bad preconceptions about it. In the summer of 1990 my team of campus missionaries were invited to teach at a youth camp in Davao, and when I first learned of it I was dismayed. Of all places, I thought, why some god-forsaken place all the way in Mindanao? Isn’t there a war there? Aren’t people getting killed left and right? Is there even electricity there? I was so apprehensive that I actually tried to get out of going by exposing myself to chicken pox through a friend who had it.
