March 18, 1998 Wednesday Evening

Dear Family,
Our daily reports are going to stop for a few days while we are on the road spying out the land for a future work. We will lose the availability of our fast computer that easily handles the large volume of email. You can still write us, but our responses will slow down while we are traveling and limited to a much slower laptop.

The 4 p.m. call today from John Junk of the American Embassy said that both he and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had received the fax from Bill McDonough in Myanmar. Mr. Chacky Boudtavong, Chief of Division for the Department of International Organizations, was very friendly and said he was pushing hard to obtain a decision from his superiors. John asked Chacky about the prisoners as he had heard they would be tried last weekend but nothing happened. Chacky had also heard that rumor and the latest gossip was that now it would be this weekend. John thinks this long wait is a good sign. If the Lao government was going to just give them long jail sentences, they could have done that a long time ago. He hopes the long wait means there is a major discussion going on at the highest level of government about what to do with the 13 Lao Christians.

If John's suspicions are correct, that means all your efforts are bearing fruit. Letters, emails, and telephone calls to your elected officials and the Laotian Embassies are putting great pressure on both the American Embassy and Laotian government officials in Vientiane. The potential of losing Most Favored Nation status with the United States is a terribly expensive price to pay for locking up thirteen Christians. The acronym Lao PDR, officially the Lao People's Democratic Republic, may begin to mean Lao People Denied Riches by their own government's actions.

God bless,
Ken & Jean Fox