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Prima and I started this family in 2002 in Grand Rapids, Mi. where I had a nice house and I worked as an electrician for Johnson Electric, but that didn’t last long. Being in construction I could see the signs that Michigan’s economy was about to fall so I had to get out. My wife is a teacher and wanted to teach for the same organization she went to college in and taught for in the Philippines and Thailand, the Seventh-day Adventist Church. There were no openings in Michigan, so she asked me where else she should apply. Well, being a skier I wanted to move to the mountains so I told her to try Colorado, Utah, Lake Tahoe Ca. or Wyoming, then, just for the fun of it, try Hawaii.
She applied at a few schools in the area’s I mentioned but the only one that accepted her was Hawaii. They offered to move all our stuff, everything, pay for the flights, and found us a furnished apartment to stay in while we waited for our stuff to get here and get our own apartment. It was just what we needed, so we agreed we’d make the move.
Sure enough, shortly after she was hired in Hawaii, I was laid off, and no one was hiring. The ripple affect of the auto industry hit the whole state, but really hard here in Grand Rapids, we had many factories making car parts in the area. I tried to sell my house but I was too late. By the time I put it on the market, the market was saturated, there were houses all over the north west side that went up for sale the same time I put mine up, I couldn’t get half of what the value of what my house was just a month before (I took a huge loss)… The economy took a fall, just as soon as I had a way out, I thank God for that.
4 years later, we decided we wanted to move back to the mainland. I lost my job operating a camp up in the mountains, they decided to have volunteers run the property to save money. That job came with a house and all utilities paid plus a company truck. Because our daughter was only 2 years old, one of us had to stay home (we don’t do daycare) and well, she had a good job and I didn’t any job now, so it was me, I had to be Mr. Mom. But it was too hard to live in Hawaii with one income, so we moved to Wisconsin, just outside Milwaukee and I started a computer business while she taught at an elementary school. My business was out of the apartment so I was there with our child, and we had a second one shortly after moving there, so this worked nice. My business boomed for about the first 10 years, until everyone started going on their phones and tablets and stopped using desktop computers.
After 16 years in a little apartment in Wisconsin, we had an opportunity to move into a nice house in the area I lived for 40 years, north west Grand Rapids, at the same time a job opened up at the SDA school just a mile away. The way this all worked out was undeniably God’s doing, to many coincidences, which I don’t believe in, especially not when you pray for something so complicated and it falls in your lap with all the details worked out.
So after leaving Grand Rapids for about 20 years, we’re back.