As of Nov. 1st  A Heart for Wisdom School officially entered into it’s new 2018 – 2019 school year.

We’re still registering a lot of children but on the first day of school we had 714 student registered.   Over a hundred newer students this year.  Having the success with the graduation scores again in July really helped bring in more students.  I think we’re about 50 students shy of every class being full.

This year we have 22 classes running and 1 extra class for children really behind, most whom can’t read or write when they join.
We have around 38 staff this year.  We had a few new staff arrive but we also had a few old staff choose to leave.

One of the cool things taking place is that we’ve been able to raise our starting salary significantly from $125 to $200.
Still shockingly low to American’s, but its above the national average and and competitive to other schools here in Cambodia.
We’d really like to get salaries up somewhere between $300 and $500 a month, but that will take a little while longer.

If you could keep in prayer we did have three key staff quit unexpectedly.  They passed a test to go work for the government, even though they were under contract with us for another year.  It’s quite disappointing and has given us a real difficult start in the office, especially since two of the people who quit were our only office staff.

We’re praying for the right people to fill these roles and that we really focus on hiring Christians who want to serve.  We don’t have that fully yet.

The first couple days of school went really well.  Supper easy compared to years ago when there was just craziness on the first day.  As the first day of school was Thursday we only had two days of school before the weekend came and though the start was easy, we were all supper thankful Saturday was so close because we were exhausted.
The snack shop was slammed with nearly 50% more sales than normal.  Which means we had about 3,000 to 4,000 individual sales.  Average transaction is about $0.10 cents.  It was maddening to say the least.

We are also under new construction projects.
We are remodeling the yard, I’ve mentioned this before maybe just on our facebook site.  We’re raising the yard about 12 inches for better drainage.  The better drainage will reduce the mud in the yard which tramples the grass and kills it quickly.  We’re installed French drains through out the grass area and we installed the drain pipe around the yard this past week.  We’ve shrunk the yard space and made a tiny track for sports kids to run with out killing the grass.

Next Projects:
Will be adding a second floor to the team house.  This will be the new home/orphanage for the children.  We’re pricing this out right now.
Here’s were we are at with the current building.   I’ve added an overlay of what we’re looking at minus the roof so you can see the interior.

Next will be adding a roof and walls to the Ball Court to make it more useful as a church and meeting area.  Right now it’s either burning hot or raining.  Left is the court today and on the right is the projected look.  Walls and domed roof, Estimated costs $20,000.
Our friends school in Australia is going to cost them over $2,million to roof their court, so needless to say we’re oh so pleased at low costs of construction here.
   
I suspect maybe around May we’ll begin remodeling the downstairs to the orphanage into class rooms.

If you’ve missed previous posts I’ll share it again.  The future of the orphanage is winding down.  The need for such a project has dramatically changed over the last couple years as the countries situation continues to improve.  When we came to Cambodia, the average live span for an adult male was 65 years old.  Today its climbing past 80.  When we came most husbands would spend 3 months at a time away making money for the family.  Today men are working closer to home most spending only weeks away.  Many many things are leading to a better family situations and again kind of put the house out of business.

God is closing one door and opening another He’s used the way we raised the kids at the house to be so attractive to the community that they also want the same for their kids.  Often positive comments come from parent, even the public schools that they see the kids have better morals and standards than they use to.

So we have 5 boys and 8 girls left.  We will be building a smaller home for them on top of the team house that we have.  We’ll also be transitioning from a Quote “Orphanage” to a children’s home.  The rules are far different and a lot less government when the title changes.  So we’ll be a large home until they all graduate over the next couple years and we remain just a school.

The current building will be remodeled into class rooms.  We’ll get 12 classes from the building.  This will buy us a lot of time to grow before we find full scale property we’ve been praying for.

So that’s what’s been happening.

Personal stuff;
I’ll be announcing this  a lot over the couple months   Ream and I would like to take the family back to the states for a month.

End of May to the end of June.  We plan on going to Philadelphia attending a mission and pastor conference and ending in Costa Mesa at a pastor conference.

We really need help from our friends and family in Southern California.  Staying and getting around.   We really lacked offers last time so we canceled.

I have a great desire to take the kids camping in the Sierras.  I use to go so often and I’ve never really taken them.  We did do a camp out when Sam was 5 and Joe was 2 but that was 11 years ago.  I’m pretty sure as Sam will be 16 this year that I’t likely the last time we might be able to do this as a family and them being kids.

However I have no idea how I am going to make this happen.  We really need any help anyone can offer on this, so I don’t need to buy camping supplies for a weekend trip.

It’s been nearly 6 years since we were home as a family and this won’t  be possible with out a bit of help from you all.

Thank you