OUR NEW VAN

We took delivery of our new van a few weeks back and it is sure nice to watch the children leaving for school knowing that it is doubtful the driver will be calling to tell us the van broke down… what we had been living with for the last year.. Thank You to all who contributed to this project!

To those of you who sent donations this last month, “Thank You” so very much for your generous offering of love and compassion for the children of the Home of Hope. Your gift came just in time…. it is “shoe” and summer clothes time here at the Home of Hope and we will be buying all the children new shoes and sandals. We do this each quarter but at the beginning of summer…. school’s end, we always have to go with two pair of shoes each… one to finish school in (tennis shoe type shoes) and then sandals for the coming summer.

We also have developed a system over the years for planning on when to buy the children clothes based on the average growth rate and time of the year. So with this go-round, we are also buying summer clothes. We always try to use “hand-me-downs” as much as possible but once the children move out of the nursery age that becomes an impossibility as their clothes just don’t last that long. Needless to say, our normal expenses don’t stop and wait for us while we purchase the shoes and clothes, so as we said above, your offering came in a very timely fashion Thank you so much!

We apologize for this update being late in getting to you but this past month has been a whirlwind of activities which led to our not being able to maintain the schedule we normally follow in keeping in touch our friends and supporters.

On May 6th, Nathan’s younger brother (right), the pastor of our home church, Destiny Church in San Antonio, Texas, unexpectedly passed away.

After a whirlwind trip to the US for Dave’s funeral and memorial service, we returned to China to find that Happy, our little Albino baby has suddenly gone completely blind. We are currently in the process of trying to determine the actual condition of her health and now the doctor is saying we may need to take her to Beijing for additional tests.

We knew her eye sight was poor but did not expect this sudden turn of events in her little life. The doctor also told us there is some rapid degeneration of her muscle system and her nervous system also seems to be deteriorating! We solicit your prayers on Happy’s behalf.
JAPANESE VISITORS

In the picture to the right you can see two of our Pastor friends from Japan who visited a few weeks ago. We took them to PingYu and XuZhou Home of Hopes as well as their coming to GongYi. The eldest pastor became our close friend when Nathan was about eleven years old living in Japan with his missionary parents. At that time, Pastor Nagai was a 21 year old Bible School student. Pastor Nagai (on the left) now ministers in Japan, China and other asian countries.

Pastor Sugiyama, (to the right) is on the Pastoral team of Osaka Evangelistic Tabernacle which was founded by Leonard Coote, Nathan’s grandfather, more than 75 years ago and which is still going strong.

In the picture below, left to right: Brook (XuZhou House Mother), Pastor Nagai, Nathan, Pastor Sugiyama, Pastor Lin Yi, who works in both Japan and China reaching China’s disadvantaged youth (We were not aware until this visit how many Chinese young people run to Japan and Korea in an attempt to improve their life), Bob Sayre and Kelly, Bob and Cindy Sayre’s translator.

Left: Home of Hope children, attentively listening to Pastor Nagai with Pastor Lin Yi translating (below right), as Pastor Nagai teaches the children’s “Sunday School”. These pictures were taken during the week in XuZhou and we did the same thing again on Sunday in GongYi.

It was quite interesting in that Lin Yi speaks Chinese, English and Japanese but after our visit to XuZhou he had to leave. Neither Nagai Sensei nor Sugiyama Sensei speak Chinese. Nagai Sensei speaks no English but Sugiyama Sensei does. We ended up translating from Nagai Sensei speaking Japanese to Sugiyama Sensei speaking English to Gail and Nathan translating the English into Chinese. Nathan’s Japanese began to come back rather quickly after the Japanese friends were here for several days but he didn’t feel comfortable translating direct from Japanese to Chinese… maybe next year! Also, Nathan has been invited to speak at am aniversary meeting in November.

FIELD TRIP
Some of our first through fourth graders in our Home of Hope school, had a field trip to the GongYi museum. They had a real nice time and were talking about the things they saw for several days.

There was an old, typical Chinese bed. Many of the older homes still use these. Some of them were designed to hold hot coals underneath to keep the bed warm in the winter.
Also a lot of typical household furniture, again which is still to be found in many of the older Chinese homes. We will just show you several snapshots of their trip. Enjoy!