Homeschool Students Service Scholarship

Born in Thailand, I grew up deep in rural Laos, surrounded by rice fields and rocky sharp mountains. When I came of age, my mother taught me the ABCs and sent me to a nearby Lao pre-school where I stood dumbly amid the local babble. In the afternoon, Ting and other friends would come play, and – at first in spurts – I learned to speak Lao fluently. My rich childhood and out-of-the-ordinary homeschool adventures have fueled my future missional dreams and planned course of study in Economics and Business Analytics at Patrick Henry College. In 4th grade, we lived in a stilted house in a remote jungle village. The house had no ceiling, but Dad put a clear plastic sheet between the rafters and the patchy tile roof. If you looked just right, you could see the sky through the glitches in the tile matrix. That year I did quite well with Astronomy – though more from spending nights outside stargazing with near-zero light pollution than anything else. Between math, science and writing, we read Rasco and the Rats of Nimh. Those rats must have had cousins at our place for when we looked up towards the roof tiles, we saw enormous rats running to and fro throughout the length of the house as they padded their way over the clear plastic. By the time I hit 8th grade, we moved to a house near the muddy Mekong River. At that house, I enjoyed staring across the river into Thailand, my mind floating away into the flotsam and jetsam of future dreams. In our family, one subject came before everything – Bible, a full half hour of personal reading daily. One sultry morning, I flipped to the New Testament and was reading along fine until I hit the verse, “Go into all the world and proclaim the Gospel to all nations.” It was as if Jesus had pointed his finger and told me to go. For weeks, the verse wrestled with my imagined future. Finally, I decided to give my future to the Lord and obey his call, and that is how I won a huge personal victory. In the last couple of years, I started thinking about colleges. To prepare for missionary work, I’d have to push myself to new extremes, and Patrick Henry College seemed just the right place. One of my favorite highschool subjects was economics, and I particularly enjoyed the book Whatever Happened to Penny Candy. National economics in Laos in those years went bonkers. Inflation soared with the value of the currency crashing to 40% it’s previous value. Gas shortages meant cars stretched down the road and out of sight for those few gas stations that remained opened. I enjoyed tracking the economic principles behind it, and Patrick Henry College’s Economics and Businesses Analytics major caught my attention. I’ve applied, been accepted, and hope to use business for the glory of God among the nations.