[image:311:c]After a long 16 hour trip, I’m back in Budapest. I’m pretty exhausted right now, but I’ll be better in a few days. It is great to be home.

It was a wonderful week for many reasons:

1) The meetings were truly ground-breaking. If we can work together across the world to create good measurement tools for our ministry then it will make a huge difference. I’m looking forward to working closely with our team in Singapore to develop the first version of the software. I couldn’t have imagined that the meetings could have gone better. They were hard, but I think it is going to pay off.

2) I had a great time with my dad. It was fun to hang out with him and catch up on each other’s lives. What a priviledge to get to work with my dad!

3) I enjoyed getting to visit Singapore. Since I live in Eastern Europe, Singapore didn’t feel like a foreign country to me. Since everything was in english and there were western stores everywhere, it felt very comfortable to me. There was a Stabucks on every corner and we even ate lunch at California Pizza Kitchen yesterday. I brought home some Oreo cookies for the family since we can’t get those here. They were really excited. The local food was also great. I liked the Malaysian Satay best and the Chinese Food second.

Click the picture above to see the whole gallery.

[thumb:304:l] We finished our 3 day meetings and man am I exhausted. We worked really hard and most of our breaks were filled with side meetings. It feels good to be done and to have accomplished so much.

Now, I’m looking forward to some rest and a couple of days of sightseeing with my dad.

Click the picture to see more of the city of Singapore

[thumb:300:l] We all survived the first day of meetings. Here we are diving into the tough issues of how to track measurements globally. Bet you wish you were here .

[thumb:299:l]We spent Monday just orienting ourselves to the city of Singapore and resting up for the meetings that start on Tuesday.

First, we went to an Indian Restaurant in Little India. It was basically rice, different sauces, and with a few choices of meat (mutton & chicken). It was served on a banana leaf placemat and we were supposed to eat with our fingers. I chose to use the utensils, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.

Then, we went to a large electronics mall. It was six stories of electronics stores with every type of camera, mp3 player, computer, etc . . .that you can imagine. It was totally overwhelming.

I took a little rest in the afternoon as jet lag was closing in, but I only slept for 30 minutes or so.

We capped off the day at an open air foodcourt where we ate a Malaysian dish called Sate. It was basically meat on a stick flavored with different sauces and it was excellent. It was like barbeque in a lot of ways and we all really enjoyed it.

Our meetings started a few hours ago and they are going well so far. More later. . .

Click on the picture above to see more.

[image:291:c]At about 5:15pm Singapore time, I set foot on the Asian continent for the first time. I have to say that so far it doesn’t feel much different to me. Singapore is a beautiful place and there is English everywhere. If we hadn’t been driving on the wrong side of the street, I might have thought I was in the US. It is beautiful and clean.

I’m checked into my hotel room at the Fort Canning Lodge YWCA (the name threw me at first, but it is a regular hotel that is run by the YWCA). As you can see from the picture, I have a beautiful view of the park across the street with the city in the background. Very nice.

The flight was uneventful. The 11 hour and 15 minute flight from Frankfurt was the longest that I’ve ever been on by a couple of hours. It didn’t seem too bad, though as I slept 4 or 5 hours. I’m not too exhausted right now and it is already 7:15pm. I should be able to stay up for several more hours at least. My dad gets in around 1am so I guess I’ll wake up for a few minutes then.

Tomorrow’s agenda is to get over jet lag. We will eat Indian food for lunch and Singaporean food for dinner. It should be quite an adventure. More pictures tomorrow.

Tonight, I’m headed to Singapore. It will be my first time to go to Asia so it will all be new for me. I’m meeting with a team Campus Crusade Staff from around the world about how we measure our ministry. It will have a significant impact on our ministry around the world.

I’m mostly looking forward to it because my dad will be there. It will be great to spend 6 days together.

Asian food isn’t my favorite so we’ll see if the real thing is better than the exported kind. I’ll get plenty of chances to find out.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to post pictures and updates while I’m there.

For the last two days, I’ve been sitting in school board meetings. Every year the board of ICSB has a two day “retreat” to focus on strategic issues fo the school. This time we were working on transitioning to a concept called Policy Governance. It is a method of operating the board where we can focus more on strategic issues while leaving the details up to the director.

The cool part of the time is that we had a facilitator come and lead our time. His name is John Schimmer and we have a cool connection. His daughter, Jackie, and I went to school at Trinity Christian Academy and Texas A&M together. It was fun to spend some time with him and he did a great job with the training.

It was a busy two days, but we accomplished quite a bit. I don’t always say that after board meetings, but this was a landmark meeting for the school.

I am sitting here in the airport in Kiev on my way back to Budapest (Free WiFi in the Kiev airport!!!). We were meeting with our team that is creating a Russian Language Internet Ministry. We made a lot of progress especially in the area of responding to visitors. We were trained to use a Ministry Response Center that will allow us to distribute emails to volunteers automatically. I was only able to stay for part of the week, but I’m really excited about the possibilities. I think that this will enable our ministry to reach many, many russian speakers with the gospel. We are all ready to go and wish everything could be done by tomorrow. Hopefully, things can be live at the first of April.

It was my third trip to Kiev and I continue to enjoy the town and the people. It is a great city to visit and our staff with Ukraine for Christ are extremely friendly. It was cold and snowy, just as you would expect it to be in Ukraine in the winter. Jerry blogged about our adventures finding a taxi.

Back home for a couple of days of School Board Meetings (YAAWWWNNN).