Approved!

All of our humanitarian projects were approved. The one project (water project) was a major initiative so that one has been sent on to Salt Lake for headquarters approval. The other four were area initiatives and so now we will meet with the different local partners and will have them get bids for the equipment and material costs and then we will continue to move forward for these projects to come to fruition. The four projects mentioned were school supplies for needy children in Tuzla and Sarajevo, the purchasing of seeds and fruit trees in villages which suffered from the drought this summer, and the one to help the sheltered workshop with equipment to train people here in Tuzla. It is overwhelming the many hoops that need to be jumped through for all these to happen, but the end result will be worth it. All these hoops are necessary and have been set in place so that the people benefit from this help and no money is wasted on managing the project.

We marvel at the support we have from home. We have been delighted to have some of the parents of our young missionaries acknowledge that they too are following our blog. We do so love the young missionaries. Whenever we have a problem with our computers, they are great to help us correct it. What would we do without them?  Remember it was the elders which brought down our computer equipment from Croatia and set it up. Just this last week we were trying to print out business cards and could not get them to line up. Well between Elder West and Elder DeFreitas the problem was solved in no time. The paper we use here is not 8 1/2 x 11, it is called A4 which is just a little longer and a little narrower than the paper we are used to.  In just minutes the problem was resolved and our cards look great. The young missionaries are a great blessing in our lives. We would certainly be in big trouble without them.

We are starting to feel comfortable with our location. We have been looking with the young elders to find a place to hold church and use for their |English classes. We have identified a few locations and will check them out this next week. We have discovered a hair salon just across the street from our apartment building that two of the people speak some English. Each week when I get my hair done, we work on a phrase-they tell me how to say it in Bosnian and I tell them in English. We do the same thing with some of the women who work in the grocery store which is in the bottom of our apartment building. There is one girl who speaks pretty good English and so when we can't find something we can go to her and we usually can figure out if it is something we can find here or not. We are finding that lots of people are just like us. They know some English, but they are not any more comfortable speaking English that we are Bosnian. But we have made some great friends. There are people at the grocery store, the fruit stand, the appliance store as well as the hair salon. We have a neighbor, who doesn't speak English, but he and his wife are good grandparents to their two grandsons and so we feel we have a common bond.

The young elders continue to try and find people to teach, with limited success. The work is challenging, but we all feel strongly that this is where we are supposed to be.

We had some great news this week. On Wednesday we went to check on our car and discovered that it was all done with the exception of the roof liner and air bags being in this week. We went back on Friday and the car was not at the auto repair shop, but was over at the dealership where they were programing the software needed to make things function. This is great news. It will be two months on the 6th of October since the accident and will be nice to get our car back.

We look forward to being able to watch conference over the internet this next weekend.  We had great hopes to watch the General Relief Society Meeting, but it did not seem to want to stream live.  But isn't modern technology wonderful? 

We learned that our Bishopric was released today and a new one sustained.  We will miss Bishop Howes and wish him well ont his new chapter in his life and are delighted to hear that we now have Bishop Pingree to work with.