Visa trip to unknown destination

Still no break through for our visa or accreditation issues and now our accreditation has expired and our visa will expire on the 18th of March. We have no choice but to trust that the Lord is in charge and what will happen will be for the best. Meanwhile, we have had our project to do more hearing aids for the deaf approved and funded. This time 30 people will get high quality hearing aids that will enable them to become more self-reliant and better integrated in their families and their communities.

We are still waiting to find out if our project to buy needed equipment for an orphanage will be approved.

Our time is being spent getting the final requirements done for our wheelchair project. We were told that the 500 wheelchairs have been shipped and should arrive in Astana the last half of April. The Church is also going to send specialists to train 20 locals how to properly fit someone for a wheelchair and how to do assembly and maintenance for the wheelchairs. This has not been done for previous wheelchair shipments to this country so we are excited to add this new training. As a part of our assignment for the training we have to get the tutorials and documents translated into Russian and then printed. As you might imagine it takes a few iterations to be sure that the English intent is reflected in the Russian. The structure and expression of the Russian language is VERY different from English and for the mechanical, medical, and other expressions in the Fitting Tutorial to be translated into Russian takes quite a bit more verbiage than in English. It is still not as bad as my first mission language - Tahitian - which took a one page English story and turned it into almost 5 pages!

We are hopeful for a quick Spring. The temperature has been above 0 F for almost a week but what amazes us is that the temperature will be only 5 F with lots of sunshine but the snow and ice will start to melt - too weird!

Here are a couple of pictures from our Pot Luck after Church on Sunday ....















This is nice Kazakh leather art that was given to us by the Deaf Society in Almaty.

"Believe in the Lord your God, so shall ye be established; believe his prophets, so shall ye prosper." 2 Chron 20:20