Busy July!

In late June, we celebrated Father's Day and Ron's birthday on June 29th by having lunch at P. F. Chang's, a really good Chinese restaurant.   

Carole Booker, a teacher at Westbury Christian Schools in Houston, TX, makes a trip to one of our safe houses every July. 

She spends two weeks teaching the girls, having crafts that go along with her Bible lesson, having English conversation with them and treating them to gifts and outings.   

She obtains funds from the church and individuals for her annual mission trip.   Our girls in Luang Prabang, Laos are enjoying her for the 2nd year with girls from Vientiane taking the train to join them in these fun activities. Carole stays in an air conditioned room in a small hotel but she faces extreme heat and humidity at the safe house each day.   

Ellen Mao has just returned home to California after a five-day visit with us.   She stayed with Leigh Ann but we spend three days together as I prepared some of the dinners for all of us.   Ellen is a registered ICU and first responder nurse with teaching ability.   

Ellen plans to take some other nurses with her in the summer of 2025 to the mountainous safe houses in Nepal to teach them about hygiene and health, reaching out to conduct training to the communities and to the girls in our safe houses.  Ellen is a graduate from the Harding University School of Nursing.  She's been on several medical missions in past years when we had orphanages in China.  

We took a dinner cruise around Clearwater when Ellen arrived last Friday.    It was a delight cruise with good weather and a wonderful meal.   Leigh Ann and Tatum went with us but the group picture was taken by the waitress and the sunlight was coming through at our location and the picture was terrible.  Here are a few pictures taken on the cruise. 

We watched Hurricane Beryl as it made its way through the Caribbean and up the Texas coastline.  Each week, we will keep a watch for additional storms forming off the coast of South Africa and heading our way.   We will not be free from the risk until about November.   There have been freak storms even into December but that is rare.   

It has been too hot to enjoy our new patio but it is delightful to look at out of our back door.  The plants are doing well with the usual shower each day in July as the weather is always a little unsettled at this time of the year with pop up thunderstorms rolling in from the Gulf of Mexico.  

One of our sponsors, a long-time friend and a deacon over missions in Greenville, TX visited us a couple of weeks ago.   He was in Tampa for a business meeting and came over to see us and have dinner with us.    We had a very nice time together.

An older couple from the Central church of Christ in Clearwater, the first church we visited after we moved to Florida, had us over for dinner one night last week.    We had a very nice dinner and an evening playing dominoes with them.    We have not had much social life with members of the church since we moved here.   Where we are attending now is a little too far for people to want to come to visit us. 

The Casa Esperanza of Angels orphanage in the Philippines is having a wonderful summer.   

     Seven of their students have been baptized in the past few weeks. 

They are enjoying the new learning center and having worship services there now.   The children are enjoying a summer of various things such as VBS, crafts, singing practice, Bible quizzes and memory verse learning and lots of interesting classes and activities.   

Ron and I will leave on the 20th for a three-day trip to Jacksonville for Ron's follow-up visit to the Mayo Clinic.  It will be a 5-hour drive on two of the days, as we go there and return home, but it will be a nice change from sitting at home working on the computer every day.   

Thanks again to all my followers who give us great encouragement as we continue to do the mission work from home.   We miss seeing everyone but once we moved here, it is too far for us to make trips.

Please keep us in your prayers.