Viviane's Birthday

Our week was wrapped around Viviane's birthday on Thursday. If you have been following us in this blog, you know how difficult and cold the winter was for us. The picture below shows Viviane as we were leaving for our mission on the left. The middle picture shows what a toll the winter took on her! However, now that Spring has sprung Viviane has been renewed as you can see in the picture on the right!

The first of the week we spent a lot of time working on project paperwork. I even attempted to translate a couple of invoices that needed to be put into our database item by item. Impossible for me to do if it had been whole sentences but I think it was successful because the words were just items of an invoice. It still took me all day to do 3 multi-line invoices.

On Wed. we visited the local Blind Society and reviewed with them the projects from a few years ago and discussed potential projects that we could help with. Their current main concern is that people in Kazakhstan have only one doctor who does artificial eyes - he lives in Almaty about 650 miles south of here. The poor folks from the rest of the country have no way to get their artificial eyes fitted or replaced. As I understand it, an artificial eye needs to be replaced every 5 years or so. We are going to find out if we can get some doctors outside Kazakhstan to come here to train others on how to do this procedure. They showed us their display (see picture) of the items that the blind make in small industries to earn a living.

We decided to take the day off for Viviane's birthday and she spent most of it with a local lady friend who took her shopping. They were gone for almost 4 hours (in fairness to Viviane the 4 hours were made up of 1 hour round trip walking and 1 hour round trip on the bus with 2 hours shopping) and (for those of you who know Viviane well this will not be a surprise) they bought nothing. It was a great success for me because I didn't have to endure it! When we got back home - I had to walk her to the meeting point and then go pick her up again - the 4 missionaries came over and sang her Happy Birthday in Russian. It was pitiful, but appreciated and we had a great laugh at the end when instead of saying 'Thank you' in Russian, Viviane said ' Goodbye'!This is a panorama picture of the walk to take her to the place to meet her friend.
Here are some other pictures along this river walk... on the left is a statue of one of their great Khans who united the tribes and below is a cute ice cream truck.













This is a picture of some kids cleaning their school yard in preparation for the big holiday May 1 which is Kazakhstan Unity Day!
Friday we spent a frustrating day trying to get a handle on our finances. We have our personal finances and the Church finances - which we use to do the humanitarian projects and other related overhead like paying for our translator. Turns out the Church is real slow in reimbursing our church account and there are some items - like plane tickets - that are better purchased with our credit card and not the church debit card. So we end up with our money mixed in with the reimbursement we need form the church. Unfortunately I have not been paying close enough attention to the various exchange rates and their fluctuations. To make a long, frustrating story shorter, I built a spreadsheet that I can use to be more accurate and make sure we get the correct amount reimbursed to us (we deal in tenge and the church deals in dollars) ... even if it takes months to get the funds!

We finished out the week grocery shopping and buying a plant for our apt.