Briefly...

• Marisol Farnsworth, a part of our PIBC team, has her US citizenship interview and test tomorrow (Wednesday). Marisol, who is originally from Ecuador, should do well. Her English is good and she's been very thorough in her preparation. I'm pretty confident that her performance will be stellar. Still, we pray that she will be able to function at her best.

• PIBC president Dave Owen has made the first blog post from the island of Tol in Chuuk State, FSM. The Internet connection on Tol has been active for about a week. It is already improving our communication with the PIBC campus there.

• Otherwise it's been a rough few days on the Tol campus. Dave was there to inform the students that we are cutting the academic offerings on Tol back from three years to two years because of staffing and site maintenance concerns. We expect that most of the students who would have been third year students in 2008-2009 will come to the Guam campus a year earlier than planned. This will create some housing challenges for Guam.

• We will soon be increasing options for non-resident students on the Tol campus and hope to soon be offering the full AA program. The Chuuk Department of Education is asking for our assistance in training teachers for the public school system.

• Jens Schulz, our CFO, is currently in Hawaii, talking with the Hawai'i Theological Seminary leadership about our planned merger with them. Actually, "merger" means that their students would be absorbed into our program -- assuming that we get approval to teach seminary level classes.

• We're kind of stalled out in our fall class scheduling -- in limbo -- waiting to hear if we are approved to offer a graduate level seminary program. If we get the accreditor's approval we'll have to shift some of our teachers on Guam into teaching the seminary program. We would like to start the seminary program on Guam this fall with 10 students.

• This is a time of refocusing at PIBC. We are seeing that the best way at this time in history to have an impact on the islands is to develop leaders with a broad liberal arts background, as well as a Bible background. They need both so that they can be effective as teachers, government workers, and business people -- as well as church leaders. We are also sensing that the future of pastoral preparation and formation on the islands is shifting rapidly in the direction of graduate level education. This is an extremely complex social system and leaders are going to need advanced training if they are going to be effective -- especially as the tsunami of globalization washes over the islands.

• Delight Suda is back from Boston, where we had sent him for a seminar. Delight is our PIBC financial aid trainee -- and he had never been further from Guam than Chuuk. He had never been to Hawaii -- or the mainland -- never been on a long plane trip -- never to a place with more than 170,000 people (Guam) -- never seen snow -- until last week.