Life these days...

Every day we head into town (by truck or motorbike) to study Thai at AUA Language School. Rusty and I have decided to each study with a private tutor separately since are learning styles are so different. Language study always has its ups and downs, but despite the frustrating times we realize the importance of it. One of the difficulties with learning Thai is that where we live most of the children and staff speak Akha. If they do speak Thai they will switch back and forth between speaking Akha and Thai numerous times within the same sentence. So as you might imagine, this makes studying Thai a bit more challenging. Because so much of our time is spent with Akha people we would rather focus on studying Akha, but we have been encouraged by Luka to focus on studying Thai for the first year and after that begin to study Akha.

Rusty has been making trips to various tea factories learning about the different steps of processing tea, and options available for packaging the tea here in Thailand. Lately his time has also been filled with taking the kids who live at the Akha Youth Development Center home to their villages because now they have a 2-week break from school.

My time has been filled with working on the sponsorship program, organizing medications that have been donated by past teams, and studying language.

From the 14th-16th Luka will hold a three day training for the pastors and evangelists working under the foundation here. Rusty will be speaking for two hours on servant leadership, and I will be speaking for one hour on preventative healthcare for the villages. 

In other news, for those of you who know Ahti and Ahmee (who used to live with Luka and Ghan), she gave birth to an adorable little boy named Sila after needing a c-section. Pictures will come later....

We really appreciate the e-mails and efforts of those of you at home to keep in touch. It means so much.

Rusty and I with our lovely little Thai teacher named Kroo Jan.

Eating thai-style barbeque for our friend Ae's 

birthday in the village.

And last but not least, the sweet sticker we found on our truck when we returned to Thailand that our friend Kee placed over the dent he had made while we were gone...just our style : >)