SE finished high school in 2014 after placing at college level in the Accuplacer test. She took pre-nursing courses during the '14-'15 school year, and also worked at Chick-fil-A. In Fall '15 she worked and saved money for DTS. She had a great time in NZ there at the Marine Reach Training Centre for 12 weeks, then headed by ship to Vanuatu for outreach where they did some primary health care work on a remote island. (Like A's experience working on a fishing boat on a journey to Saipan a few decades earlier, SE's experience was, shall we say, unpleasant.)
JD played on his school's basketball team during winter '15 - '16, his junior year. Their team made it to the state playoffs. They beat the former division four state champions, a school nearby, and advanced all the way to the semi-finals, where sadly they lost to a team from Pueblo.
SJ and A had an opportunity attend the North American conference on urban ministries in San Francisco in the spring. In late June we attended a family reunion with A's dad, step-mother, and brother Fred's family. This latest season for us in YM has been special in that we are physically closer to relatives, and therefore able to see them more often than when we lived overseas.
SJ did simultaneous translation at our church for Koreans for about 18 months. She also did some written translation projects, and helped with a missions training course for medical professionals, as a translator in Hawaii in 2015. A continued serving with the YM Global Comm. Team, doing database support, research and some writing projects.
In July of '16 SJ and A went to the 40th reunion of Bikecentennial. This was a 4,250 mile bike ride that A did back in 1976, the bicentennial year. The organization "Bikecentennial" morphed into "Adventures in Cycling", the biggest promoters of cycling and cycling trails in the US, headquartered in Missoula, Montana. A few hundred people came to the events including six members of our original team.
