John’s Blog | March 25, 2012

Greetings from the Christian Mission.

Sunday evening is here and a busy weekend has been completed. Praise God we can divide ourselves into two parts. 🙂  Bee and Bpun returned from their seminar on March 22 and put their learning into practice on March 24. We now have two English teaching teams. The first team is our girls, and the second team is a group of University students that I teach. In thanks for me teaching them for free, they agree to conduct one English Camp at a village school once a month. Saturday was their turn. Our girls did it the weekend before. The Blessing is that Bee and Bpun and our other teens remain here at the mission and conduct the regular children’s Saturday program. This way we don’t have to leave the younger ones out. Our Saturday programs continues from 9 am to 2:30 pm. The children receive singing – practicing for Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday right now – Bible study and English and games. God does bless us and your prayers do it.

Next time I will have to find a way to split my camera in two so I can take pictures of both the Saturday program here at the mission and our English Camp activities. For this one, I will be attaching pictures of our English Camp activities.

My day, and Maeo’s too, starts at about 6 am by getting up, breakfast and getting things organized. We depart here at about 7:30 am, with an almost full van load. We stop by the Catholic School in town and pick up Joe and Sandy Boys. They are working as volunteers at a school here and go with us on Saturday English Camps. Joe and I get along very well – he is retired military and other things and we are both 72 years old. We arrive at the school about 8:30 am. The school for this day is about 50 miles from where we live, so it is a way out. The camp starts at 9 am with three solid hours of teaching in the morning, and an hour or two of games and preparing skits for the close. At about 2:30-3:00 pm we gather for each group to perform something they learned in the morning. Usually we finish up by 3:30 pm and start back home with a very tired group. After about 15-20 minutes on the return trip everybody but Maeo, Joe Sandy and me are sleeping. We get back to Nakhon Phanom about 5:00 pm and the fun begins. We arrive at an all you can eat restaurant. You also cook your own food. It does my heart good to see these kids spend the next two hours eating, eating and eating.  I get all the kids delivered and back home about 7:30-8:00 pm. Our teams usually have about 13-15 people. None of the students on this team have accepted Christ, so please pray for them.

Praise God, my second University class have told us that they also want to participate. That means in May, God willing, we will have three teams per month. That means we will be able to work with about 250 elementary/high school students. Thanks and praise God and please keep praying for us. More news later.

God Bless and keep, John, Maeo and the Mission kids.