It's hard to believe it has already been 3 months since we returned from South Africa. The first 6 weeks flew by and were consumed by the transition to the Seattle area and family time celebrating the holidays and family birthdays in December. We do feel truly blessed to be here during this time especially the special connection we have made with our grandson Mikah. He is a very special 3 year old and loves his Gogo and Baba. Through December and January we were able to help out with day care nearly full time. This was a huge relief for our daughter and her husband who both put in 11-12 hour days including commuting time. Brianna is working a job in addition to full time nursing school. We hope to be able to continue with at least part time day care help until she finishes school in February 2011.

Mikah helps Gogo bake his birthday cake

January was also a time to focus on Two Tunics work and especially strategic planning for the organization looking forward to the next 2-3 years. We are so thankful for the commitment and support of our board. A couple trips across the state to Spokane for meetings resulted in some important decisions being made. We believe that God is blessing the work that we are doing, particularly the work with small community based projects that are caring for children and people with HIV/AIDS in their communities. There is a gap in services to these critical community based projects and we are finding a niche and partners to help fill that gap. We have been amazed at how God has brought us partners in this work.

As a result of the strategic planning done, we together with our board have decided that it is important that we work through more effective partnerships with local organizations. We want them to develop at least inter-dependence if not independence and to have significant local control of project planning for sustainable solutions to the problems associated with AIDS and poverty in their communities. This has led to a decision that we should make a short term trip to South Africa in March to begin a process implementing these changes with our Two Tunics staff in country. Robin and I will depart on March 1^st for a 3 and a half week visit. We will meet with many of our community partners as well as our larger in-country partners like Genesis, Project Positive Ray, Food4 Africa and Give A Child A Family (GCF).

During the first week of February we spent several days visiting friends and supporters in St Louis. This was at the invitation of Grace Church who has connected with our work through the visits of two short term mission teams last year. Grace Church has helped with the completion of construction at Sunnyside Crèche project and has committed to continued support of our Community for Kids program. We were greatly blessed by their hospitality and generosity during our visit. Their next mission team to South Africa will be during our time there in March so it was good to planand dream together about how to go forward and share God's love with needy communities. We also were blessed during worship at St Louis Family Church as they prayed for us and our future. Thank you to Pastor Ron and Debbie Tucker at Grace Church and to Doug and Suzy Hufton for their tremendous hospitality and support.