Happy New Year 2024

Wishing you all an Amazing 2024, full of love and blessings.

Here’s our latest update!

Welcome to our New Project in Chiang Rai Thailand Smart Start Child Care Centre and Victory English Chiang Rai

Friends, we do apologize it’s been some time since we have updated our Blog. The last half of 2023 met with many challenges for us, the last but not least of which was a knee fracture which Karen is still healing from. All goes well she will be mobile sometime next week. We wanted to start 2024 by shouting out a HUGE THANK YOU, to all of you who donated in 2023 to support the expansion project in association with Victory Asia. After returning from our trip to Canada last spring, much effort has gone into it, and several obstacles have been overcome getting the Visas required, Social Development approval, and setting up the project. Our Victory Chiang Rai building has opened phase one of the project Smart Start Child Care Centre. As of December 1st, we had our first child enrolled and after a Christmas Break, we have re-opened the child care centre. We hope to get more enrollment in the coming months and open the ESL operation in the next 2-4 months as well. Our prayer is the income from these activities will make the project self-sustaining by the end of the year. We thank you for joining in that prayer with us.

We did an amazing Christmas outreach (we being Brian and the girls because Karen was immobile) to Paramiangmaeprig School in the Doi Luang mountains. We adopted this school back in 2016, and it’s awesome to go back and do English activities and bless them with Christmas gifts. This year they blessed us as all the children made Christmas cards for us.

We also started to homeschool Olivia, Mercy, Lida, and Grace in the A.C.E program for the 2023/2024 school year. It is the same English curriculum they’ve been studying in school for the last two years. Karen now homeschools them in this program at a considerable savings to the increased costs of re-enrollment at the school. They were able to pick up where they left off last school year, and have continued to do very well, averaging marks above 90% for the 1st quarter of the year. Another HUGE THANK you to all of the donors that support the girls, they are truly embracing every opportunity they are given.

Again Thank you to all of you who have been there for us not just this past year, but for the past 9 years on this adventure. We began our 9th year in Thailand in November. Thank you for nurturing the human spirit, one child, one village and one community at a time.