Back From Chuuk

I am back on Guam after spending four days in Chuuk this past week. The scheduled reason for the trip was to teach the classroom portion of my Genesis Exegesis class. The class is a hybrid traditional-distance education class with 8 2 hour plus sessions of classroom discussion-lecture time with the rest of the class done by on line threaded discussion, readings on the class web site and on-line quizzes and tests. Homework is done by email. The class has 6 students with two from Guam and four from Chuuk (pictured). The Guam students finished up their classroom time last week. We crammed 7 of the 8 Chuuk sessions into the 4 days I was there. I think the students were pretty tired after sitting through two sessions per day in addition to their regular classes. I was encouraged to see that all four students attended every session and am even more encouraged to see that they are starting to get caught up on their homework and class discussions. We will finish the other session when I return to Chuuk in April.

Between class sessions I had the opportunity to meet with the leadership of the PIBC Chuuk sites and with some of the Evangelical Church of Chuuk leaders. We have a staffing crisis in Chuuk right now. We still need an administrator, English teachers, maintenance person and a couple other critical positions to be filled. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that we are also losing two missionary couples from the Guam office who do a lot of the work that support our sites throughout the islands. Several options were discussed for a solution to the problem that I will be presenting to our board this week. Please pray for our board to have wisdom about the direction we should go and that the needed personnel would be supplied by the "Lord of the Harvest."