Last Tuesday night (it was 11.59.59) I left Guam to arrive on Yap very early Wednesday morning. My main purpose for going was to take care of several business issues in order to get our Yap Teaching Facility functioning again. The Yap TF was destroyed by typhoon Sudal in 2004 and, while we have taught a few classes, we have been pretty effectively shut down in Yap since then. For the last two years we have had ministry teams from California and local work teams from the church in Yap renovating the building. We still needed to take care of some other issues like getting a business license, setting up the computer lab and and generally getting things ready to start teaching classes here in May. In addition Jo Romaniello and Marci Martinelli, counselors at PIU, went to Yap with me so that they could teach a counseling seminar for the Yap hospital and other service groups. I will devote my next post to their seminar. The picture here is of the computer lab with our TF office manager Charity Sam and her husband Jonathan accessing the internet.
One of my main tasks was to secure the business license. As you can see from the picture, Charity is holding the completed business license. Another task was to take care of the immigration issues for volunteers Hardy and Irene Sunderwald so they can come this Spring to teach some PIU classes in Yap. We were able to submit a visa waiver letter and we are hoping and praying that it will be approved by Yap immigration soon enough for them to come. Another key prayer request for us is for the restoration of the Yap scholarship to PIU students. We had several Yapese students on the Guam campus when the scholarship was available to them but not many in the last three years since it was removed. The issue was that we were just a Bible and theology school and the Yap government wanted to focus its education efforts on other areas. Now that we have approved liberal arts programs we have re-applied and would ask that you would pray that our Yap students would be able to recive this scholarship that they need to pay for their education at PIU. Interestingly, even though we "just" had a Bible program in the past, many of our Bible graduates are now teaching in the Yap public schools, fulfilling what the Yap government had identified as their greatest need.
I also had the "fun" of setting up the computer lab. Most of it went smoothly. The router took a little while, two hours, because it needed to be reconfigured. Once we did that it took only a few minutes to get things going. We now have a wireless DSL internet connection for our students to use for research and classes. I tested it by Skyping today and was able to use full audio and video. I am excited about the possibilities this opens up for our distance education programs.
As you can see from the pictures we still have a lot of work to do. The empty room is the classroom. While we are all ready to go with on line classes now, we still need to buy three tables, chairs and a teacher's podium to be ready for classes to be taught. We have moved part of the library into the TF from where it was stored after the typhoon but we still have some more to move. We also have books for the Yap library stored on Guam. I am hoping it will be ready when I come back to teach Old Testament Introduction in May.
As you can see from the pictures we still have a lot of work to do. The empty room is the classroom. While we are all ready to go with on line classes now, we still need to buy three tables, chairs and a teacher's podium to be ready for classes to be taught. We have moved part of the library into the TF from where it was stored after the typhoon but we still have some more to move. We also have books for the Yap library stored on Guam. I am hoping it will be ready when I come back to teach Old Testament Introduction in May.
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