Greetings from Southeast Asia!

We had a wonderful visit to the U.S. this summer. We enjoyed spending quality time with our family and friends. It was a bit hectic at times as we tried to squeeze in as many visits with you all as we could in our 8 weeks there, but well worth the effort. We have an electronic picture frame on our counter with about 200 pictures from our summer, so basically we brought you all back home with us! The pictures make us happy and sad mixed together. We miss you all so much, but we are glad to be back too. We love our work here, our home, and the new friends that we have been blessed with. Thank you for partnering with us and for all your prayers and support!

John

This past summer our group had three computer people leave, so in addition to my regular responsibilities I am now filling in for computer support at our Linguistics Institute. Quite a bit of work has been needed on the computers at our training center up north, so I have already traveled there twice to maintain some hardware and install new software. Computer support involves many different things, but whatever it is, people are always happy to have a computer expert nearby to solve the problem. My secondary role here is Field Security Officer and that took some of my time recently due to the political turmoil in Bangkok. It was my responsibility to monitor the situation and update our group regularly on any security related events.
Our group has several Bible translations moving into the publishing phase and there are often several organizations involved during this time, so please be in prayer that those projects can be completed without much delay.

Kimberly

I hit the ground running, yet again. I love my job managing our support people, but am still trying to figure out how to fit in time for Thai studies around my busy schedule! One of my responsibilities is Children’s Education (CHED) coordinator. In this role, I have spent many hours since I got back building our library for our homeschool families. Most of our families that live in village situations homeschool by necessity, and even though they have curriculum they do not have access to library books for their kids to read other than the books on a shelf in my office! It has been fun to purchase, catalog, and distribute the books.

Praises

• The kids have started off the school year well.
• We have been mostly healthy lately.

Prayer Requests

• That we would be able to make time to study the Thai language more.
• For the many ongoing Bible translation projects in our group.
• For our relationships and interaction with our neighbors.

Family

Kristen is in 10th grade and is involved in student council and plays electric guitar in a chapel worship band. She has a heavy school workload this year with Chemistry, Physics, Algebra 2, English, Thai 2 (reading and writing), Computers, and World Geography. Kristen has teachers from five different countries; England, South Africa, Faroe Islands (Denmark autonomous province), Thailand, and America. She and Tyler are playing on the same Jr./Sr. High intramural ultimate Frisbee team, which is made up mostly of her friends and his friends (10th grade girls and 7th grade boys!). They come home talking excitedly about Ross-Ross plays (where one throws a long pass to the other, then the other scores).

Kristen, along with about 55 other high school students, goes to the Agape Home orphanage for HIV positive kids on some Friday evenings. John is usually one of the drivers since we have a station wagon that holds 11 people (sometimes more if not enough drivers show up). Agape Home currently has 73 HIV positive kids. The fact that they are HIV positive is secondary to these kids. Their main issue is dealing with abandonment and not having any family. Some of the kids are usually very sad, but they immediately perk up when the caravan of cars pulls up with the high school kids coming to play with them. Each student is paired up with a child from the orphanage for as long as the student can keep going, which is usually several years. This is Kristen's second year. Kristen's "little sister" is named Patlida and is the Thai girl wearing pink on the right in the picture above.

Tyler is in 7th grade and is currently playing in a recreational 4th – 7th grade basketball league at the school. He is finding the big move from elementary school to junior high to be "really different ~ exciting but difficult."

Sarah is in 2nd grade and just celebrated her 7th birthday with a princess party. Her friends are from all over the world. She loves school and especially loves reading and riding her scooter.

Blessings,
John & Kimberly Ross
Serving with SIL International in Southeast Asia.