Dear and good friends,

Greetings from Ashland in the midst of heavy thunderstorms.  May was dry, June and July have been anything but.

Nan and I have been back home since mid-March.  This was soon after CLAVE Venezuela graduated its cohort of 21 students speaking 14 different languages.

These people have gone back to their home villages excited about using their native languages for reading and for ministry.  We’re glad to have been a part of it.

Nan’s sisters have been helping their mother with details in the aftermath of grandpa Hinerman’s homegoing also in March.   The family has since collaborated on trying to get the farm ready to sell, and in helping Nan’s Mom find a condo in Raleigh, where she can be less isolated.  As you can imagine, selling the farm is not easy.  It is the only home the three sisters have ever known until they established their own. 

We’re very happy that a friend of the family has purchased the farm and that he is committed to keeping it a farm, rather than splitting it up into lots for urban development.  Everyone is happy about this.   Nan’s brothers-in-law also have worked hard for both the sale and the purchase to happen.   Nan and I are kind of looking for a place in Raleigh ourselves.  I can fly out of there as easily as I can fly out of Cleveland, so our home location can vary, and may soon change.

We have stayed busy helping Grandma and Elisa as able.  The twins just turned four and they plan to start pre-school in September.  Nadia will be one year old on July 27.  We hope to visit Elisa and Yury at that time and close on the condo purchase for Nan’s Mom.  She hopes to relocate in September.

I am happy to report that I have finished the rewrite of my dissertation, and it has been submitted to an editor, a woman that Nan and I met in 1975 when we first touched base with Wycliffe Bible Translators.  She wasn’t an editor then, but she is now, and she has been fabulously helpful.  I thought that I would largely be done when I turned in this most-recent draft, but she is going through it with a fine-tooth comb and asking me scores of questions each week.  I don’t mind this.  It is quite flattering that someone is taking the work so seriously and I am confident that it will be all the more readable when she’s done.  I’m still hopeful that it will be done and on the market this year.

I recently spent ten days in Grand Forks.  Where is that?  It’s in North Dakota, home of the University of North Dakota where many linguist-missionary hopefuls are presently studying.  A good number of our colleagues are there as summertime faculty members and I took advantage of having some ten of them in the same town by stopping in for a visit.  Grand Forks was fun, but there isn’t a whole lot going out there.  It’s light for about 18 hours a day in the summer, which was nice.  But I guess it’s light for only 6 hours a day in the winter—and forty below to boot. The trip enabled us to evaluate seriously how the Latin American training programs are doing. 

We’re all largely happy, but we have still begun to make a lot of changes.  Part of this is due to the fact that many of us who were once young bucks are now not so young, so if the training is to continue, we need to figure out ways for it to be passed on.  So we’re writing a lot of linguistic articles and trying to learn to use Internet resources, and the word “mentoring” has taken on urgent meaning for us all as we try to guide young scholars into good and meaningful work.  We are delighted with the quality of young people that we get to work with, both Latino and indigenous.

Nan and I hope to visit Guatemala later this summer.  I keep in close touch with Byron who was trained by the Vaters and who now leads a literacy ministry among Mam churches.  We’d like to encourage him and spend time with Mam friends and see how things are going out in our old stomping grounds.

Then in November, I hope to spend most of the month in Mexico learning some new computer programs related to linguistic fieldwork.  This is another way we are trying to train the next generation of linguist/translator/literacy people—with computers. 

Our middle child, Amalia, and her daughter, Eden, are hoping to visit this fall.  And Isaac and his girlfriend, Elizabeth, have recently become engaged.  They are planning a February wedding in Costa Rica.  We’re excited to see all the family.

We have been visiting some of our partner churches this month.  We’ll be at Grace, our home church, July 10, 17 and 24, and at Parkside July 14 and 21.  Then we’ll have a missions conference at Grace from August 18-25, and we plan to be involved in that as well.

I continue to work on linguistic articles for some upcoming conferences, so I’m staying gainfully employed.

Gods’ best to all this summer and beyond.

Abrazos.

Wes and Nan