The Eldest Son Comes Home

On 31 October, Wud, Philip's eldest foster son, officially completed his year of military service — finishing among the top hundred of his intake. "I am so grateful he is coming back," Philip wrote, "and very proud of my son, who is now a strong young man." The boy he had fostered, schooled, taken on his first flight, and watched choose the mission road had come full circle.

The tentmaker business pressed toward completion. Heavy rain washed away the only drivable access road to the home and work buildings, so they set about rebuilding and strengthening the whole ford. The ice cold-room was finished — a week to install — and the power system tested successfully; the water-bottling rooms were under construction, with the bottling machines ordered and due to arrive in January. Philip and Wud went to look at water machines for the factory, and Philip attended a pastors' gathering with Ajaan Siaan; Mark visited with Hanna, whom they had the joy of baptising in the sea.

One visit closed a long circle. Passing back through, Philip called on the language teachers who had taught him Thai seventeen years earlier, when he first arrived in Thailand; they were overjoyed to see him. Seventeen years on from that first classroom, a Moken soccer team bears his mission's name, foster sons return from the world to serve, and a village that once fled him as a ghost now builds its own future.