Last week Steve Stinnette, the PIU VP of Advancement, and I headed down to Yap to talk with church and government leaders, alumni and potential students. Steve and board member, David Mayer had been to Yap last summer and there seemed to be a lot of interest in PIU re-opening the Yap Teaching Facility there. We have been working on renovating a new Yap TF building for the last two years. The old building was flooded during Typhoon Sudal in 2004 and we determined that since it was at sea level right on the lagoon we needed to move the TF building up the hill. The building was finished last year by the group from Gateway Bible Church in Santa Cruz and my nephew, Ben Boudreault. As you can see it is still empty. We will need to get class and computer room furniture and library shelving. So Steve and I headed down to begin the process of getting things ready for opening the teaching facility next January.


Steve had already received an enthusiastic welcome from government, business and church leaders last summer and we wanted to follow up on that. In the Yap education office we were able to meet with the Director of Education who gave us a list of 54 names of interested students. We were also encouraged to hear that the Yap State Scholarship would be again available to PIU students from Yap. At the Yap legislature we met with the speaker of the Yap legislature, Senator Chieng who stressed the importance to us of Christian character building in education and provided support and encouragement to us.


Of course, the support of the Yap Evangelical Church has been tremendous in this operation. The church is donating the use of the building and area to us for the teaching facility. I appreciated the gracious cooperative spirit of the church leaders as we met with them to discuss the operation of the facility. We are planning to serve the church with seminar training in addition to our regular accredited PIU programs.


We also had the opportunity to see several of our Yap alumni. I am pictured here with Mac Alfonso. Mac is now teaching full time at a public elementary school in Yap. The Yap education department has hired several of our graduates to teach in their school system and I was very proud to see how well our grads are doing there and how they are serving in the community and church.


We also went to Palau on this trip, but, for some reason, I forgot to take any pictures there. We did have a productive time there meeting with church leaders, alumni and our teaching facility students. I had the opportunity to preach Sunday in Airai. While there I was very pleased to hear the parent of two of our alumni say "Thank you so much for what you did for my children. They have good jobs and they are serving in the church." That is what it is all about!