Ok so it's not really 1909, but we've had some issues with the server where our website is housed and although we are mostly back up, there are still some things like 1909 dates that our valued webmaster is working on.  So - it is December 17th and my (Rich) coursework in the Certificate of Applied Linguistics ended last Friday.  In 20 weeks we learned the International Phonetic Alphabet and all the anatomy of the speech producing parts of the body, studied sound systems, the impact of language on a society, acquired a second language and skills for adapting to a new culture and wrote a grammatical sketch, phonological description, dictionary, and lexicon for Swahili based on the sixteen weeks of research I had done on it.  On Friday David Ross, the President of GIAL, said, "when we set out to teach the you the certificate courses we did not intend to kill you and today you are living proof of that."    I hear him say that, but I still think they might have intended to kill us.

Anyways, the coursework is in the books and now we wait for the LBT Board to meet in January to consider our application for missionary service with LBT.  Maya will pick up some coursework starting in January with basic language structures and then second language and culture acquisition.  I will do some advanced coursework starting in Feb.

In the meantime, we get to travel around for Christmas.  We are so excited!  We will be in seven states in seventeen days with stops to see both sides of our family in Michigan, friends from seminary in Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, and Oklahoma, friends from our ministry in Dayton, and Rich gets to preach in St Joseph, Michigan and Glenpool Oklahoma (outside Tulsa).  It should be a lot of fun!

We ask you to keep us in prayer as we travel and especialy pray for us when the LBT Board meets to consider our applicaton on January 11th.

Talk to you real soon!

Much love,

The Rudowske Family