Finally, we decided on a name for our school. What should have been easy, has taken us a year to decide! This is how it happened.

Jason is the only one on our staff at the moment who speaks Karen fluently, so he was the one doing all the student interviews, and all the footwork required to start a school. But, whenever anyone asked what the name of our school was, we could not tell them, since we had no name. We wanted a name that was meaningful, that showed what our school was all about, without sounding pushy. It also had to work in both English and Karen. That was a tall order when you have to eliminate names that had already been taken. So, the students started calling our place “Jason’s school” for a lack of anything else to call it. (One of our ideas had been “Faith Hill”, but translated, it meant “The hill difficulty!”)

Finally, one evening we sat the students down and told them that we needed a name for our school. We explained to them that it had to be a true representation of what our school is like. It didn’t take them long to come up with “Jason’s English Medical Missionary School”. Jason didn’t really want his name in it, but since that is what everyone already called it, the students felt that his name had to be in the title.

I liked it a lot. JEMMS is a good description of what we want the outcome to be…we want each child to be a gem in the kingdom of heaven.