Palau Trip

I am back and pretty much recovered from my Palau trip. (It is not being in Palau that wipes you out. It is the flight back which leaves at 2.30 AM and arrives on Guam at 5.30 AM.) I would say that it was a productive and enjoyable trip. My main purpose in going last week was to meet with the Palauan Evangelical Church leadership and discuss how PIU will do distance education at the teaching facility there. The discussion was very helpful and not only included how we would take care of the current semester, but also included some visionary long-range planning for the PIU program in Palau. For the coming semester we will continue as planned, offering three distance education courses from Guam while making available our computer lab at Palau Community College to our students. I was encouraged to meet several new students who will begin their PIU studies in Palau. If things go well this semester we would offer more courses by DE and mixtures of traditional classroom instruction with DE options in the Spring. We will continue to plan what the Palau TF will look like in the future and have a proposal to submit to the PIU Board in March. This DE plan will need to be coordinated with what we plan to do in Chuuk and Yap too.

The meeting was not the only reason I was in Palau. The first night there I attended the combination installation of Hiob Ngirachemoi as pastor of the Koror Evangelical Church and good-bye party for Liebenzell Missionary Rob Watt (both pictured above). Hiob was our PIU Dean of Men for three years on the Guam campus and Rob pastored the English service of the KEC along with serving as the PIU Palau TF Coodinator. So, I guess it was sort of a trade but there were no draft choices, players to be named later or salary cap issues involved. The celebration was fun as I got to meet many old friends and the food was superb.

I also met with a man whom I am hoping to hire as our PIU Director of Institutional Effectiveness. Our accreditor identified our lack in this area as our most critical deficiency that we need to take care of. It seems that the Lord has dropped in our lap a guy who is very skilled in this area. I would appreciate your prayers as we work out details, especially immigration issues, to bring him to Guam.

In a couple weeks I will be going to Chuuk to finalize our plans for distance education there.

Distance Education

PIU has been involved in providing classes through distance education for a little over three years now. At first, all the DE classes were provided to students at our teaching facilities in Yap, Palau and Chuuk with the hybrid model. That is a teacher, usually me in the first couple years, would fly to the teaching facility, stay there a week or two teaching traditional, but intensive, discussion-lecture type classes and then fly back to Guam. The students would then do their reading and writing assignments through email and on-line discussion forums. Other materials and quizzes were also taken on the PIBC-DE web site. Since then we have added a full-time Distance Education coordinator, Hartmut Scherer and, in addition to the hybrid courses, PIU has been offering full Distance Education courses and will offer three this Fall.

This is especially important for us, as lack of staff have forced PIU to close our Tol Campus in Chuuk and reorganize our teaching facilities. I was in Chuuk a couple weeks ago working on an agreement to set up a PIU Teaching-Facility DE Center on Weno, Chuuk and I will leave for Palau in a couple hours to work out a final agreement for converting our Palau TF to a DE Center. We are hoping to make all three DE classes available in both Chuuk and Palau this Fall. We hope to have the Yap DE Center up and running for the Spring 2010 semester. All these centers would look something like the Guam center pictured above. At present we can offer only a small portion of our full programs by DE but our plan is to have our DE programs fully recognized by TRACS so that we can offer full programs in these centers and to interested individuals by the Fall of 2011. I am also looking for interested teachers who can help us set up and teach distance education courses. For more information email me or the school at centraloffice@pibc.edu

Further Adventures of Joyce

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Joyce and Anne went to the Mango Festival in Agat last week. Here they are pictured with some of the mangoes. Joyce also came home with some unusual jewelry (pictured on the right). The round beads are made from coral and the more rectangular shaped beads are made from the vertebrae of Guam Brown Tree Snakes. She really likes her unusual necklace and earrings. So now Joyce is looking for a 4 foot, or longer, snake so that she can kill it and trade it for another jewelry set. The guy that makes the jewelry says that when she kills it she should put the whole snake into the freezer until she can bring it to him. So be careful if you are reaching into our freezer for ice cubes.

Joyce has also been putting a lot of work into our yard. She has the Japanese grass pretty well spread through the front and back yards now. I have been posting some pictures of her flowers in several posts over the last few weeks. We have also the enjoyed
the production of her fruit and nut trees. Saturday, on the first sunny morning after a week of pretty much constant rain, we also realized that we are growing mushrooms. Once you get the plants into the hard ground and rooted (that is the hard part) things seem to grow pretty well here!

Another Goodbye Party

Thursday our PIBC/PIU group met at the Magellan Restaurant in the Niko Hotel to say goodbye to Jens and Karin Schulz. Actually Jens and Karin won't be leaving for a couple weeks yet, but several of our people will be off-island when they actually leave. So by popular demand we had the going-away lunch a little early. Jens and Karin have been at PIBC for nine years now as the Chief Financial Officer (Jens) and bookkeeper (Karin). There were a lot of reminisces about how much PIBC has changed during the time they have been there. The Schulz's have played a very important part in the foundation and development of PIBC/PIU as an accredited institution of higher learning and they will be greatly missed.

Except for having to make another goodbye speech, the party was fun. The traditional going away gift was given - a couple Flores' prints depicting life on Guam. The Niko has a pretty good lunch buffet which changes every couple weeks. This week's menu featured Asian. Despite the fact that we had to say goodbye (again!) we always have a good time whenever we get the group together, although we did miss quite a few of our PIU family who are on the mainland raising support.




By the way, We have not yet found replacements for Jens and Karin. We still need someone to come in to replace Jens as our VP of Finance and Operations and we need to find (at least) a part-time bookkeeper. We will have our remaining office staff cover some of the responsibilities but we have an urgent need to find someone very soon to get ready for the coming school year. Please pray for this need. And consider, wouldn't you like to join this good-looking group doing Kingdom work here in the islands?

Cool Stuff at the Japanese School

Joyce continues to work at the Japanese School of Guam as an English teacher. She enjoys her work there very much. So much so, that she has increased her weekly hours. She works three mornings (Tuesday to Thursday 4 hours) a week in the classroom and has added two hours each on Tuesday and Thursday afternoon in the after school care program. This works very well with her classes and teaching schedule at PIBC/PIU. It also gives her an opportunity to have some interaction outside the PIBC and church community. Of course the school is very happy with her work and has hired her for the next school year.

Joyce says that one of the cool things about doing the after-school care is the different equipment the Japanese school has in their play-yard.....

Of course there are the standard swings, that are not always used in the way they were originally designed to be used.







Then there are these balance posts to run and walk on.









And then there is this tire/pole/rope thing that looks like a lot of fun to play on. I have heard a rumor that Joyce can get air-borne off of this thing. Joyce says that the really cool thing is the garden at the Japanese school and she promises to bring home some pictures of that for a future post.

Happy 4th from Dave and Joyce

It is already the 4th of July here on Guam, where America's Day begins so we are in our second day of Independence Day weekend. We spent most of our Friday looking at and test driving cars. Our Santa Fe has been giving us some trouble (and there are a lot of times where we need to be in two places at the same time) so we have been saving some $$ for some time to buy another car. After looking at pretty much every economy car on the Triple J lot we decided on the Kia Optima. I will put a picture up of it as soon as the loan goes through and we get it. For now, I am putting up some pictures Joyce took of her trip to the Mango Festival last Sunday. Joyce didn't get Friday off from the evangelism class she is taking. It is an intensive class so they meet right through the holidays.

It is mango season on Guam. All over the island the road side stands are selling mangoes. Right now I like the mangoes, blended into smoothies and in salads. The fruit is great. The blossoms (in April and May) make me have an allergic reaction.






So, we hope you have a Happy 4th of July. We will be filling some holes in our road this morning and then going to a BBQ this afternoon. Happy Independence Day!

We Are Now Pacific Islands University

According to our accreditor TRACS, PIBC has now officially become PIU - Pacific Islands University. We still need to change the DBA's on our business license to reflect that we are one university with three schools- Pacific Islands Bible College, Pacific Islands Evangelical Seminary and Pacific Islands Christian College. I am trying to find a local lawyer who can help us with this and a couple other transition issues. We are also in the process of changing our web site, seal and logo - and of course the most important thing: buying new PIU shirts to sell. We are excited about the changes and are praying that the new people we need for our expanded programs will be found soon. We are also happy to have many new student applications, more than we usually have at this point.