Friends,

Last month Kanto Gakuin Middle & High School students held their annual "Cultural Festival" and various groups in the school organized and ran booths for the big event.  Having a Cultural Festival is a normal part of school life in much of Japan--schools usually hold them in early November to coincide with the Japanese holiday, "Bunka no Hi" (or Culture Day).  This year was the first year I got to help the school's small YMCA group.  This group sponsors volunteer activities throughout the year, and has been around at KGMS for a long time.  This year, we decided to have a coffee shop and to provide origami paper on the tables so that people could fold paper cranes while they rested.  Students from our school, along with students from two other Baptist-related schools in the Yokohama area, decided that each school would fold 1000 cranes to take to the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima next year.  I don't know about the other schools yet, but we met our "quota" at KGMS (with over 1,200 folded!)...

Pray for the YMCA group's life and influence here. The group has been around for a long time, but has not been as active as it could be, so starting from next year; I'm going to start working as one of the group's faculty supervisors.  Right now we're brainstorming about how we're going to try to spruce things up...

Also, on October 26th, Adam turned 8!  For some pictures of the YMCA group at school (folding INCREDIBLY SMALL cranes!), and of Adam's multicultural birthday party, visit our homepage real quick...

http://pws.prserv.net/jpinet.dpdavid/davindex.html

God bless you all and thanks for your continued support of our ministry.

Peace,

Dwight