“Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.”

It has been 50 years since Canadian singer and poet Joni Mitchell first recorded these famous lyrics, but in 2020 they seem especially poignant.

On March 18, all schools in Thailand, including our learning center, were ordered to close indefinitely as more and more new cases of COVID-19 were being reported daily. March through May is the hot season in Thailand, and most schools have summer vacation during this time. The activities and programs we have for the kids in the village during the hot season are important because this is usually the time when the students have the least supervision. So, we were feeling sad that we couldn’t minister to them.

A few days after we suspended all our programs at the learning center, one of the grandmas from the village was lamenting to our neighbor. “I don’t know what to do for my grandchildren or the neighbor kids. Now that they aren’t in school, they just watch movies and play with their cell phones all day. I really wish the learning center was still open so there would be something good for them to do.”

After we closed the learning center, Tonya continued to work diligently to prepare activity packets with worksheets, games and crafts for our students to do at home. Every week, Teacher Ming and Teacher Keren would go by motorcycle and drop off the packets from house to house along with pencils, scissors, glue or whatever else the kids needed for the activities.

Even though the COVID-19 pandemic has brought interruption and hardship to so many people’s lives, one silver lining has been that more parents and caregivers in our community see the value of what we have to offer at the learning center. Please continue to pray with us that God will give all of us wisdom, wherever we are, to know how to serve our neighbors in creative ways during these challenging times.

• Twitter