Dear and good friends,

Greetings from Wake Forest. I'm not used to writing such things, but it is true. Nan and I have relocated from our dear Ashland, Ohio to North Carolina to be near much of our family. Elisa and Yury are here and their three kids, and Nan's mom has moved into her new digs just this past week. We are five minutes from Elisa and fifteen minutes from Nan's mom. Isaac is in Atlanta, so he's now a much shorter drive away. Amalia and family are still in Hawaii, but they just came east for a visit.

Nan and her two sisters were heavily involved in helping their mom pack for her move. After living on the farm for over 60 years, grandma had accumulated a record-setting number of knick-knacks of all kinds. These treasures occupied boxes and boxes of the things that were just moved to her new place. She will most likely be busy with the dusting and placing of these things until Christmas, And since the new house is a lot smaller than the farmhouse, the concentration of nick-knacs to free space has pretty much doubled.

I got back on September 12 from a two-week trip to our old stomping grounds in Guatemala. There is lots of good going on there and I was able to visit a number of Mam churches and sit in on Old-Testament translation work and Literacy classes while I was there. We're grateful for your interest and support of this work.

I had asked some of you for prayer for Byron, my Mam friend and colleague, to get a visa for a workshop in Mexico in November. I was hopeful, but not confident. It is hard for Central Americans to get visas to Mexico because authorities assume that the visa is just a stepping stone to illegal entry into the US, so these requests, especially from Indians, are routinely denied. But the Mexican consulate looked on Byron with favor and now we're planning to work together on some computing issues and linguistic and translation problems for a month.

I wonder if any of you might have an older, functional PC that you are not using. I am a Mac user, and the programs we will be learning in Mexico are written for PC's. I'm looking to borrow for a month a PC with Windows 7 installed. Might you have this available? I'm planning to leave on October 30, so time is a bit of an issue. Thanks for considering.

I continue to grind away on my book. It is a rewrite of my dissertation for the general public. I appreciate your patience in this. While I was in Guatemala I went through some of the data I had used for my dissertation. I wrote the dissertation almost ten years ago and some of the data is from our early days in the village (1980). Some of these data needed to be re-edited. This has affected some of the analysis and the "new" analysis had to be inserted into relevant spaces throughout the 300-page document. These sorts of details, to say the least, are not my cup of tea. But we're progressing. I'm very much blessed by a demanding editor who seems to have a photographic memory along with her sharp red pencil. I would like to be done with the heavy lifting on this this month. I don't mean that it will be sent off to the printer this month, but that only details will be left to deal with.

Prayers and encouragement are appreciated.

Happy autumn and lovely colors to all.

God's best to you.

Wes and Nancy