Do you know anything about homeschooling? If so, you know what a full-time job it is for the parent teaching. Whether you have one or many, homeschooling is never easy long-term. Add in regular life, household management and parenting and you can very quickly get overwhelmed. Now, add in ministry, living in a foreign culture and no easy access to, well, anything in English actually (from libraries to supplemental material to actual curriculum) and you quickly have a recipe for very high stress levels. High stress in one parent leads to high stress for the other, the kids, the whole family, the ministry; life and ministry can quickly spiral down from there. In an effort to alleviate this stress and support families on the field in their ministries, we are developing a homeschool helper program.
Sarah’s here! We took her to the annual flower festival here in Chiang Mai and enjoyed seeing all the displays.
Our second homeschool helper, Sarah, arrived recently through the organization TEAM (The Evangelical Alliance Mission). We are so excited she’s here! She is a sweetheart and good fit for our family. She flew into Chiang Mai (our city) February 9th after a 7-day mandatory quarantine period at the beach (not a bad deal there), and we have spent this past month getting her set up with all she needs to live here and started with the boys’ lessons. If you’ve followed our blog this past year, you’ll know we had our first homeschool helper, Amanda, here for 9 months. Through this initial experience and now with Sarah, we developed an understanding of some of the logistics required to do this with more helpers for more families.
As we develop this homeschool program, we need an organization such as TEAM to do the Stateside logistics (processing support money, medical insurance, references and all the other details that need to happen before they come.) Then, Lance and I will handle most of the logistics in Thailand (host family placement, housing, cultural acclimation, visas, etc.) Obviously all of this will take a lot of planning, refining and, most importantly, prayer. Please keep this new program in your prayers as we start this process. Pray for our planning, the people God would have come and those here who need the help. Pray that He would guide us in all of this and prepare everyone involved for this ministry.
Thank you for your continued financial and prayer support,
– Ruth, for the Baker family
