fixing the house and leaving the country

Wow, the house is nearly complete! After several weeks of entertaining workmen in our home, while trying to work out of it at the same time, we are thankful to see them go :) The job foreman is the only one here today, as he does a little touch up paint, and prepares the rear exterior wall for its paint job. All the major repairs (hole in the wall, new roof, new siding, new windows and doors...) are complete! Let's pray for no more natural disasters in the neighborhood this year.

So, by the time we return from our trips on the 9th of June, our house should be 100% complete!

We leave tomorrow morning with Bill and Laura from Loyola for our 10 day missions excursion to Port-au-Prince Haiti. Please pray for us!

After that exciting trip, Jen and I will celebrate with a week of vacation on the beach in Florida--praise the Lord!

We'll post some pictures and stories of everything when we return.

Graduations!

Saturday, we attended our first graduation of the year at Loyola. We celebrated with Jontue Jackson, Andrea Savickis, and Laura Post.

Laura joined us the moment we moved to New Orleans in July of 2007. She is from the New Orleans area, and felt that God wanted her to go to Loyola. She knew about Chi Alpha from several of her friends that attended Louisiana Tech and were involved with XA there. She wanted to know if Loyola had a Chi Alpha chapter, and we told her, "Yes, you're it!"

Laura plugged in immediately, and stepped into a leadership role. She's the first four year Chi Alphan we've seen all the way through. She has been such a blessing!

This coming Saturday, we will try to be in two places at once, as we see Brandane Smith graduate from UNO, and Annie Chung graduate from Tulane.

Reconciling students to Christ--transforming the University, the Marketplace, and the World!

Tulane Recovery

This past fall we saw much smaller freshman classes at all the New Orleans universities. Many prospective students and parents where still very worried about the recovery and safety of New Orleans, and the universities themselves.

Two days before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, we helped move in nearly 1,700 freshmen to Tulane. This past fall, there were less than 1,000.

However, news was just released that the fall 2007 incoming freshmen at Tulane number nearly 1,400! And they don't just come from the USA, but Albania, Brazil, China, Ecuador, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, India, Mexico, Oman, Panama, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and the United Kingdom, as well.

I have not found numbers for the incoming classes at the rest of the universities we minister to, but this is good, exciting news.

read the whole news story here: http://www2.tulane.edu/article_news_details.cfm?ArticleID=7339

Getting Ready to Visit Haiti

The Nation of Haiti is the poorest in the Western Hemisphere. It has a history of oppression, slave trading, racial violence, and is the home of the religious amalgamation known as voodoo.

It is located on the island known as Hispaniola, sharing this spot of land in the Caribbean Sea with the Dominican Republic. Hispaniola is south of the Bahamas and east of Cuba.

The nation has been wracked by political turmoil in recent years in response to years of gross exploitation by government leaders. The people have needs of all kinds.

Jen and I are getting ready to take a 9 day trip to this nation at the end of the month. We will be accompanied by two Loyola students, and we hope that this trip might be the first of several the Chi Alpha New Orleans will take in the future. In some ways, it's a scouting trip.

While we are there, we will likely be working with children in an orphanage, serving, and possibly teaching about Jesus at schools, serving those who serve the people of Haiti (pastors, missionaries, teachers, orphanage workers), and praying at the University in the capital city of Port-au-Prince.

Please pray for us as we prepare for this spiritually intense trip. We need special grace with passport applications that have been delayed, especially.