Dear friends and ministry partners, Krista and I hope you had a blessed Christmas and we wish you a very happy New Year! In our family, Amanda is currently home from college for a few weeks during the semester break and Nick is enjoying a couple of weeks off from school during Christmas and New Years. We made a one week trip to Michigan to be with our families for Christmas. It was great to see both Krista’s family and mine and to celebrate Christ’s birth with them! My father is elderly and we were able to spend a good amount of time with him and help with household chores, since he now lives alone after my step-mother’s death earlier this year. We thank the Lord for this opportunity to visit our loved ones, and for granting us safe travels, avoiding the snow storms that passed between North Carolina and Michigan. At work my team is making good progress on the project to deliver Internet connectivity and low power computers to remote places. We have now delivered systems to Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, and Mozambique, and upgraded systems in Mexico. We are preparing more systems to deliver in January to the South Pacific area and to Papua New Guinea and Cameroon, with other locations to follow soon thereafter. The pace of this project is beginning to pick up as we have anticipated, and we are making ongoing improvements to our processes for setup, delivery, and support. It’s exciting to hear the comments from the national mother tongue translators about how these tools are greatly accelerating their work on Bible translation! I have posted a few photos online showing the people receiving training on the new equipment. We praise the Lord for providing the technology, the people, and the funding to move forward with this project! Please be praying for the Lord to grant the team wisdom as we work on the cutting edge of technology, and for favor from foreign government officials of whom we are requesting licenses for the satellite communications. I am also starting to get ready for a trip to Nairobi, Kenya from January 22 to February 5. For the first week I will be involved with meetings to plan the next year of IT training for African coworkers across that continent. During the second week I will be performing a security audit and providing network consulting for the team at the Nairobi office. This site is a major hub which serves a number of Bible translation organizations in East Africa. After this trip I will have some pictures, Lord willing, to share through our web site. I would appreciate your prayers as I make preparations, and then take the long trip of over 18 hours in the air each way. Krista and I feel blessed to serve the Lord, and privileged to have you as a partner on this journey. Thank you for helping make our work possible, in order for others to get God’s Word in their heart language! Wishing you a healthy and joyous New Year, Hank & Krista |