PIU Teaching Facility to Reopen in Yap

I am just back on Guam after spending a few days on Yap. I had just been there a couple weeks ago and needed to follow up on a few things from the previous trip. We have had tremendous response from the news that we will re-open our teaching facility in Yap in January. I had some more good meetings with government, business and church leaders in Yap. I also got to preach at the English evening church service on Sunday.

Monday afternoon I met with several interested students and their parents. We went through the application and financial aid process and talked about college life on the Guam campus and how things would work at the Yap TF. A few had taken classes before, when we had a missionary-teacher stationed in Yap, but most were new students. It looks like we will have at least two new students from Yap on the Guam campus in January and I would anticipate about 10 students taking classes in the Yap Teaching Facility when we begin in January. The courses there will be either completely on-line or "hybrid courses" which have a week of intensive classroom sessions with a visiting teacher from the Guam campus and the remainder of the course on-line. We have a lot to do to get ready. I bought 10 chairs and one folding table for the classroom. We will need more chairs and tables, a desk for our new TF office manager, Charity Sam, library shelves (we have about 800 books in storage for the Yap TF), computer and printer tables, whiteboards etc. We will also need to bring down our already purchased computer equipment from Guam to Yap. Hopefully, we will be able to connect the ADSL internet in early January.

Here are a couple things to pray for as we prepare to resume classes in Yap...

1. Pray for Charity as she is here on Guam for three weeks for training. She will need to know a little about everything: library, financial aid, finance, academic advising etc. to run our office.
   
2. Our biggest need is for a Teaching Facility Coordinator who is qualified to teach for us in Yap and develop the facility.
   
3. Please pray that PIU students from Yap will again become eligible to receive the Yap State Scholarship. We anticipate this being approved before the end of the month. This better enables students from Yap to afford room, board and tuition at PIU. Since it was taken away two years ago we have not had one new student from Yap.
4. Pray for our Yapese alumni who are now serving as pastors, public school teachers, church kindergarten teachers, hospital administrators and other key positions in Yap government, businesses and churches.

We are excited about being back in Yap and look forward to serving many Yapese students.