Kim and Jeremy in Thailand

Jeremy's web provider is going to be moving servers this next week, so the website will be down starting approximately Monday morning in the US. All is not lost! It should be back up within a few days, but I wanted to give everyone a heads up. Have a great day!

I just updated the Q&A section, so now you can find all the juicy details of our everyday lives in Thailand. Enjoy!

Did I mention that I'm coaching soccer now? Myself and Holly, another new teacher here, agreed to 'help' with the 13 & under girls' soccer team. We said help because we both had about the same amount of experience with soccer-none. I certainly don't know the rules, and the only time I've ever even played was on an intramural team at Wheaton composed entirely of computer science students. It started as a joke, since we figured we were about the least likely athletes around. We played for three semesters and never won a game (although we did muster up a few ties). My strategy was that since the other players were mostly guys twice my size, I'd run right at them, and they'd hesitate out of fear of hurting me (they were nice boys) for long enough for me to kick the ball out from under them. That was pretty much all I did. So I felt very unqualified to coach, but said I'd be willing to 'help'.

Well, somewhere along the way, our role morphed from helping with the 13 & under girls' team to coaching that team on our own and helping with the JV and varsity teams. The JV/varsity teams have two very good coaches, so our 'helping' there is really more of a tutoring situation, but at any rate, I am now a soccer coach. This definitively proves that God has a very funny sense of humor. There should be some really interesting stories coming from this one!

Well, at least for a week. Next week is October break at school, and both the students and the staff are excited about that! I have a monster pile of grading to do, but hopefully I can wade through most of that before Hume Lake camp starts. I'll be going to the high school camp, which starts next Thursday and goes through Saturday. The students are psyched up for it, and I'm really looking forward to the chance to get to know these kids better than I can in the classroom. Please pray for the camp; it has the potential to be a time where God really makes Himself known in these students' lives.

Last night was nice. Normally, on Tuesday nights, a large group of us go to the Garcias' house for dinner. Jennie is the elementary school principal, and she and her husband Chuck have a lot of us over for a large, usually western meal. It started out as for just young single people, but now it would be hard to put a label on the people who come. About the only thing we have in common is that none of us have children here! Every Tuesday there will be around 20 of us who go and eat together.

But yesterday Chuck and Jennie were getting on a plane to Washington D.C. to attend their daughter's family weekend at college. We figured dinner was off, but then we got an email from another staff member inviting us to meet at 5:45 to be whisked off to an undisclosed location. Ten of us came, and we all piled into her songtaew-style truck (benches in the back to sit on) and went to Il Forno, an Italian restaurant in downtown Chiang Mai. It was really good! They served pasta in a sort of thin tortilla bowl, and had delicious appetizers of lunchmeat and cheese, which are rare here in Chiang Mai. We had a wonderfully unexpected time of fellowship and great food!