Will's First Birthday

Can you believe that it's 1 year since Will was born? Amazing - but true. Today (20th May) was Will's first birthday. Given the amazing gift Will has been to us, we decided that this year we'd go all out with a huge celebration - thanking God for all he's done, and thanking our many friends for being there by our side. We opened the morning with the customary present openings. Here's a few photo's of Will opening presents. Here's mum with Will, opening one of the many cards he received. Smiles all round (although at 5am when will woke up - the smiles were not quite as bright!). Here's Will doing his best to take it all in. Obviously the whole present thing was quite new to him, and it took a while to get him into it. Ripping the paper was fun (as was subsequently eating the paper), but spending any time looking at the presents was a challenge (partly because he's not quite up to that, and partly because big brother and sister were eager to look!). Cleo very much enjoyed opening Will's presents. We managed to get Will a turn on his new bike. I expect that next year, the older kid's won't have quite so much luck opening Will's presents - he'll have worked it all out by then. We then moved on to church where we were having Will dedicated. Here's the family all dressed up in the Sunday best. Jack, Cleo and Will. The Boys. Into Church to have Will dedicated. Our opporunity to publicly commit to raising Will to know the saving grace of Jesus Christ, and to publicly (in front of the Church community) express our thanks for what God has done for us in bringing Will into our lives. After Church we hosted a party at the Hong Kong Cricket club. Great venue, great food. We had around 60 adults and about the same number of kids for brunch. It might seem a little over the top for a kid's 1 year old party (ok perhaps a lot over the top), however, we wanted to take this opportunity to thank God and to thank all of our friends from the various communities we mix in (Church, Work, Cricket, School, etc.). Here's the most formal part of the morning - giving a short speach prior to cutting the cake. For those of you somewhat amazed by the cake. Here's a close up. Jules spent a couple of days putting this together. It had to be huge to ensure everyone got a piece - so the train and carriage seemed like a good idea. Went down a treat. Here's Will hanging out with his mates. These guys were a tad small to spend much time on the jumping castle - so sitting back and surveying wasn't a bad option. Finally, talking about Will's first birthday wouldn't be complete without mentioning his Godparents. Again we've gone to excess in this regard - but with good reason. We decided to ask pretty much all the couples who came and supported us day in and day out at the hostpital 1 year ago, and who met Will before Julie did (even if it was only a fleeting glance), to be Will's God parents. Here they all are with Will. The Sutherlands (who - by the way are also to blame for our involvement in ICM). The Millers - double up with these guys, as Tobin got to do the dedication also. And last but not least - the Chengs. Great family friends - and parents of Jack's best friend in HK - JJ. So their it is. Will is one. God is good. The Turners.

After three and a half years in China we finally hit the Wall.

What an amazing two weeks we had over Easter. The Turner 5 and Kaehler 2 (my Mum and Dad) embarked on an 11 night/12 day tour around China that turned out to be 1000 times better than any of us could have expected. For starters, not one of us was sick (other than air sick one day but one out of five flights ain't bad) and we even risked life and limb to have the odd salad and piece of fruit. Secondly, as long as we had our own packet of tissues and good quadrilaterals we managed the public squat toilets with ease. Finally, the sights were even better than we'd imagined. Let the "Slide Night" begin... Our trip began in Beijing, clear but cold we set out for the Temple of Heaven. It was a great start to the adventure and although we were a bit chilly we appreciated the temple and our fellow temple goers appreciated us (seen here in the first of many photos of the Turner Minors currently on show in thousands of living rooms across China in their own Slide Nights!). Day 2 was my main purpose in going. After viewing the Ming Tombs and a few other thousand year old things we spent an awesome afternoon at the Great Wall. It was clear and crisp but not too cold as we hiked to the highest point of the restored section we'd driven to, about 90 mins from Beijing city. I made everyone pose several times at several locations to get the frameable shot. I was delighted with the many options and I don't think 200 photos in 2 hours is too many!! To our surprise we had the entire Wall to ourselves, in fact our guide had to leg it back to the Cable Car so they didn't turn it off and go home as we were in danger of being left there, just the 7 of us. Day 3 was Tienanmen Square (where we got to fly a kite), ######### City and the Summer Palace...I could go on about every day but I'm sure you have to do something important soon so I'll skip ahead. Day 4 we flew to Xi'an in the West of China before on Day 5 we saw, again among a 1500 year old Pagoda (built by Tripitaka of "Monkey" fame, don't say you don't remember the English dubbed Chinese made show on ABC in the 80's) and a 6000 year old Neolithic Village we saw the astounding Terracotta Warriors (now classed as the 8th Wonder of the World). If you're not familiar with it - in 1974, peasants digging a well discovered fragments of what they thought were pieces of pottery. 33 years later you can walk around 3 specialised sheds covering the untouched to completely restored forms of over 7000 greater than life sized terracotta warriors. These were built by the first Emperor of China, Qin, 2000 years ago to serve as his army in his afterlife. We were there on Good Friday and it paralleled that Qin and his army, although some of them now visible to us were long dead and buried as opposed to Jesus, who after just three days returned to claim his after-life as the Forever King of God's Army. Day 6, after checking out the Great Wall of Xi'an, very nice but a tad on the small size as walls in China are concerned, we flew to Guilin in the South. Not knowing much about the area we were stunned by the beauty of the 44,000 uniquely shaped mountains surrounding the city and the Li river. We cruised the latter on Day 7 and Dad took great pleasure in taking the mickey out of our first grumpy guide (our previous two had been great). Just ask Dad about the nuts of the osmanthus and the mist... Day 8, a few more sights in and around Guilin, including Jack's opportunity to hold a monkey (still praying for protection from disease!) before flying on to Shanghai that night. Day 9, we swept around the Jade Buddha Temple, Shanghai Museum, etc as we saw the city that has grown from around 1 million to 13 million in less than 100 years. This photo shows an area called Pudong - not one of these buildings existed 20 years ago. Day 10, with the official tour finished, the Turner 5 visited the McLachlan 3 and the Kaehler 2 stayed on in the hotel for a couple more nights. The highlight of this day was watching Mum and Dad do ballroom dancing in Zhong Shan Park with the many other retirees - it is a National past time in any open air area, especially in Shanghai. That night Rob Mac and the Turner 5 experienced the stupendous acrobatic troupe of Shanghai as the performers did feats no-one should try at home. Day 11, the gang got back together for a trip to Zhouzhuang using Rob and Rachel's driver. Imagine Venice as a small fishing village in China and that's where we were. Although we had the worst food here of the whole trip (aside from the Pork Knuckle which Harry swore by) we lived to tell the tale and loved our last full day on the Mainland. Day 12, we waved our goodbyes to Rob and Rach and the many tourist trinket vendors who laughed every time we said "Bu Yao" (I don't need it) in our Aussie accents. In a nutshell (but not an osmanthus one) China is a must see and if you didn't know the truth you'd think it was the best country on earth. Now, get back to work, or sleep or whatever it is you're supposed to be doing! Love Jules.

Will can crawl !

Will is mobile! I thought I'd share with you a short video capture of Will's first few forward movements. He is now very mobile and is crawling all over the place. Everything now has to be moved out of reach. Gran was very excited as she is visiting us in Hong Kong, and has witnessed a first for one of our children for the first time.

A trip to the Philippines

A while between posts thanks to a continued strenuous travel schedule. Combining work travel with ICM travel can be a bit of a challenge. Anyway, I thought you might all be interested in one of my recent trips to the Philippines working with ICM. David Sutherland (Chair of the ICM board and a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley) and I travelled to the Philippines to meet with a variety of people in a variety of places. We arrived in Manila on Thursday afternoon, and spent the evening meeting with the ICM executive team in the Philippines. It is always an interesting collision of cultures when people used to working in Investment Banks work with those serving the poor in the slums. Generally always a positive learning experience for us (in many ways), and this meeting was no exception. We were spending time before our budget meetings (coming shortley) discussing the vision for the future. How we continue to improve our programs, what things we do well, what things need to change. So many ideas, but so few that we can practically implement. On the Friday morning we met with Dylan Wilk from another NGO in the Philippines called Gawad Kalinga (GK) specialising in slum re-building. If you have time, checkout their website: http://www.gawadkalinga.org/ We were meeting with Dylan as we are doing our best to strike a partnership between ICM and GK. This partnership has great potential, but comes with great challenges. For example, GK is an organisation stemming from the Catholic organisation "Couples for Christ". From my experience a wonderful Christian group. Unfortunately co-operation between protestants (such as the ICM team) and Catholics in the Philippines can be difficult (to say the least). We believe the meeting was one further step forward in this reconciliation, and in the eventual partnership we hope to form. We are looking to completely re-build one of the worst slums in the Philippines. The slum is in Bacolod City (Google Earth directions - "Bacolod" lat=10.674907, lon=122.951934) and is across the road from the original home of ICM. If you scroll in on google earth you can see the many slum dwellings. After this meeting I met with a man who was suggested as a good contact in relation to our potential move to the Philippines. He currently sells helicopters across the Philippines, and has opened a call centre and is in the process of opening a McDonalds in Dumaguete (the most likely city we would move to). This was a very encouraging meeting for many reasons. Not the least of which was that we got some comfort that if we moved, life for the kids wouldn't be too bad as there are a number of quite good schools in that city. It was also very interesting to me as I have been considering opening a small IT development centre to provide a level of income while we live there. He was very interested in a possible partnership - so there is potential ! In the afternoon on the Friday we met with a fabulous woman, Ruth Calinta, who runs a micro-lending organisation called "the Centre for Community Transformation" (CCT). Check out their website if you're interested http://cct.org.ph/. Again the purpose of this meeting is to organise a partnership to strengthen the work of both organisations. CCT specialises in micro-loans to what are considered "the entrepenerial poor", however have rarely tried to deal with the "ultra poor". ICM deals almost entirely with the ultra poor. The ICM program selects the poorest 25 families from a community. These families join the "feeding program". This program aims to provide food and eduction (spiritual and health) for a period of 6 months. We see great change in these people. They come into the program without hope, and finish the program with hope. It is at this point that we desire to give these people opportunity to join the CCT program. Given the number of people we reach each year, we (and CCT) are very excited about the potential of this program. On the Saturday we flew down to General Santos city in Mindanao. Our goal was to meet with local government who had been assisting us with various ventures in that city. In particular we have recently opened a computer training school aimed at teaching a well recognised qualification to homeless "street kids". The mayor of General Santos was kind enough to meet with us and we better still, we had some outstanding meetings for the majority of the day with the head of the local Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). We were very encouraged by the openess of the DSWD to work with us - in particular in relation to the schools we plan to open in that area. Then on Sunday we flew from General Santos (missing out on bombings and racial troubles) to Bacolod City. We went to a local church, met with a number of the elders and then met with a local businessman (Bob) who is very involved in GK. We talked at great length about how to move the slum reconstruction program ahead. Initially, the government had committed 1 hectare of land for this purpose (which was a start - but not enough). Recently, out of nowhere, the government granted another 5 hectares for this project. Very exciting. Bob was a genuinely brilliant man, and we could see why this program was moving forward. Bob then asked us to come to dinner on the following night with the Mayor of Bacolod. While this was a short meeting, it was helpful for the foreigners (us) to demonstrate our intent and commitment to the mayor in the hope of return commitment. Its coming up to election time there and so commitments are coming thick and fast. Finally, on Monday we drove for several hours into the mountains for the formal opening of the Don Salvador Benedicto (DSB) Integrated Farming School. This is a venture targeting the rural poor with the hope of educating them to better utilise the land they have access to. The vice mayor of DSB attended the ceremony, as did many of the local town leaders (referred to as Barangay Captains). This was great as we have had problems with some of these people in the past, so a showing of support was helpful. Tuesday, we flew back to Hong Kong and went directly to work. A well deserved rest. Anyway, I thought I'd log this on the blog as it was a very exciting trip for me. Many great hopes being built of the partnerships we can achieve and therefore the help we can give to the poor. God Bless Harry

Short Update - Subscription

All, just a short admin update. Ignore the stuff about weblogs in the previous post. I have gone 1 better. I've added a "subscribe" function to the left side of the blog. If you want to receive updates about any time we've updated the site, rather than checking on-line, then feel free to do so. Just type in your email address and press the subscribe button. Hope that helps. (btw, has anyone worked out what a FOE Christmas Message is yet?) Harry

The last few months in the lives of the Turners in HK

Long time since we've updated the blog. Sorry, a bit slack. Much has happened in the mean time, almost all of it related to our work with International Care Ministries. Before getting too far into the post, just a small administrative note. I've added the site to Weblogs (www.weblogs.com). This means that you can subscribe to a service that lets you know when we've update the blog. Saves suffering from the McCarthy fate of logging in regularly in the hope that we've updated. Ok, in order of events: 1. Julie and I (and others) prepared an annual report for International Care Ministries (ICM). To be honest quite a challenging effort. Coordinating information from across both HK and the Philippines can be quite difficult. Also quite a challenge to best describe the programs, showing their underlying Christian motive, but without being off-putting to our non-Christian supporters. The PDF is too large to post here, but I'll get it on a site, and add a link here in the future. We were trying to get this done in time for the annual fund raising banquet (on the 20th November). We got it out with time to spare (about 8 minutes, but that's not important). 2. Julie spent a very substantial amount of time and effort helping to coordinate ICM's annual fund raising banquet on the 20th November. This was a monumental amount of work for all involved (fortunately not me). It was a fabulous evening, and we raised over HKD $4M! Amazing generosity from the people of Hong Kong. While this helped to solve much of our annual fund raising requirements, it has also brought abou some new challenges. We received funding to support over 20 new Special Medical Funds (seriously increasing the scale of this part of the ministry) and to support a mind blowing 30 new schools (we had only 5 prior to the banquet). This is a great blessing of course and a great challenge. 3. A mission trip to Dumaguete, Negros Island, Philippines. 4 families (Turners, Gardners and DeGroots from Hong Kong and the Hayeses from Australia) packed up and left for the Philippines on the 15th December. The plan was to run a 4 day kids camp, targeted toward the children from the Dumaguete Childrens Shelter, the children of some of the ICM staff, and the children of some of the slum church pastors. This was the first such program we had run, and as such was a pilot program. In future, we will target kids of families who are recipients of the ICM programs. This trip was truly amazing. It was a great experience for all of us. We couldn't have imagined before going how much God would bless us on this trip. Working with children with so much energy and enthusiasm and absolutely no inhibitions to having fun was a great experience. There are many stories from this camp, truly too many to post here. Instead, I'll just add a few photos and a couple of little stories. The kids arriving at the camp in the ICM jeepney. The campsite was fabulous, a real blessing for the children who spend most of their time in a slum environment. Each morning we kicked off with a time of worship. The kids just loved it. Their energy and enthusiasm was amazing - a great inspiration. We were teaching some Colin Buchanan worship songs. They learnt them in about 3 seconds and never looked back. Dumaguete has now been Colinised !. Cleo and her friend Olivia (Livvy) dressed as shephards ready for the Nativity play. Jack and his Mark (from the ICM Children's shelter). This was the first time most (if not all) these kids had their faces painted. The kids in the orphange convincing Jack to take one of their puppies home (nb. they did manage to convince him - very easily - but weren't quite so successful with Dad).

Kids dressed as sheep for the Nativity play. These guys were great. They "baaadddd" loudly all through the play (narrative included).

We dressed up the kids in fancy outfits and took photos of them. As a craft activity, we then decorated picture frames that the pictures ended up in. The overall message of this activity was they God had made each one of them special and that he loved them.

I could go on and on. Perhaps some other pictures later, or even a video if I can get it sorted.

Have fun, have a great new year, hope you all had a merry christmas, etc.

Harry & the rest of the Turner family.