About
We met each other when we worked together at Asian Christian Academy (ACA) in the summer of 2000. Melissa worked at ACA as a house mother at the orphanage and taught English classes at the school while Christo worked at the Agape Medical Centre. After spending three years apart, we were married in August of 2003. We spent a year as teachers in Dallas Independent School District (Christo taught high school chemistry while Melissa taught the 6th grade ESL class). About a year later we were blessed with with Karuna Allene Philip who was born on June 25th, 2004.
We then moved our family to Rochester, MN in 2004 where Christo started medical school at the Mayo Clinic. Meanwhile Melissa worked part-time with her E-Bay business and tutored over 20 English writing students a week. Two years later we were blessed with the arrival of our first son, Luke Yohannan Philip who was born on September 12th, 2006. After finishing medical school at Mayo, we have traveled back to Dallas, Texas where Christo finished his residency in emergency medicine at UT Southwestern (Parkland Hospital). During residency, we were blessed by the birth of our son, Vivek Joseph, who was born on February 1st, 2009.
After finishing residency, Christo joined an emergency medicine practice that staffs several ERs in Dallas and the surrounding communities and he continues to teach part time as an assistant clinical professor at UT Southwestern in the Parkland ER.
Our long-term goal has always been to pursue medical mission work abroad in India. After several trips to India over the past few years we have committed to joining the staff at Duncan Hospital (part of the Emmanuel Hosptial Association) in northern Bihar (on the border of India and Nepal). We hope to be back in India for long term medical mission work by the end of 2013.
