Things Are Looking Up!

$2,000! Holy cow! That’s what it was going to cost us to ship our box spring and mattress over to Burkina! So much for our great idea. When we read that in an e-mail from the shipping company, we knew we were going to have to find another way to get a good night’s sleep in Africa! So off we trekked to see what Canadian Tire and Wal-Mart had to offer.

Do you know what we discovered? The “Bed in a Box”. Did you even know such a thing existed??? Well, it didn’t when we first went to Burkina, but believe me, it does now! It’s a full-sized, mixed foam mattress that has been specially compressed into a box the size of a large tent, and weighs about 90 lbs (40 kg). Once unpacked and released, it is guaranteed to expand to normal size and provide a comfortable night’s rest for years to come. We tried out a floor model. We loved it. We bought it.

Apart from that, we spent much of the day on the Internet and the phone, checking out prices on carpet cleaning (to leave our townhouse as clean as when we got it), a new windshield for our car (it has some cracks from stones and we’d like to give it back to Kathy’s dad in good shape), a new battery for my laptop (after 5 years, the battery only lasts 20 minutes per charge now), and a myriad of other things. I’d really like to get a new laptop since this one is showing its age and likely won’t last much longer in the extreme temps and dust of Burkina, but we can’t afford it right now. C’est la vie.

I also spent some time bringing our financial records up to date, filling out a ministry expense report for July, and, almost on impulse, rechecking our ministry budget for return to Burkina to see if there was anything we could trim to help reduce the amount of funding we needed. Imagine my surprise and delight to discover that the premium for our overseas health insurance coverage was incorrect! It was nearly double what it should be. When I corrected that and factored in several new financial partners that God had brought on board over the past few weeks, our budget shortfall dropped to a mere 7%! Wow!

As you can see in the sidebar, we’re now only $340/month away from 100% and permission to buy plane tickets and head off to Burkina. Praise the Lord, things are looking up!