Practical matters

We just wanted to make the official announcement that 100% of our Outgoing Funds are in!  For those that don’t know, these are specific funds that we were asked to raise by our organization for "start-up" expenses here in Mexico, such as setting up house, language school, and travel to Mexico.

Praise the Lord, and thank you to those who helped!

Current donations for our ministry go toward our monthly expenses first (such as rent, groceries) and then toward ministry expenses.  For a brief explanation on how this all works, visit this page, or contact us for more details than you ever wanted.  😉

You may remember the issue we had with the Canada Revenue Agency.  We had two tax returns under review, and we had lost some of the paperwork we needed during our move (that’s the short version – click the link for the more detailed story).  We ended up spending CA$120 to get the paperwork replaced, and then we waited for the response…

Good news!  We got word from the CRA that "no adjustments are required".  That’s a fancy way of saying,"Yeah, well we checked out that part of your income tax return and it looks like you did it right after all.  Sorry to bother you.  Talk to you another time."

The timing is great – just in time to start working on this year’s income tax return!  😉  I guess I’d better get going on that…

We’ve been requesting prayer about language school lately, and you may be wondering, what’s the big deal?  Isn’t it all pretty straightforward?  Go to school, learn Spanish, move on?

So let me just take a few minutes to explain, for those of you who are wondering.  Basically, things are very flexible with language school.  We can do pretty much whatever we want here as far as language learning is concerned, as long as we get to a certain level in a reasonable amount of time.  That reasonable length of time is usually around a year, but it could be longer (like 18 months, for example) depending on how you do things.

So we have a lot of options.  Since January, I have been taking the regular recommended classes at the university, 5 days a week from 8am to 2pm (with some short breaks).  Shari has been working with a tutor through the university (and at the university) for two hours, three times a week.  That’s six hours a week (and I didn’t even check my calculator).  Shari goes after I’m home, so we switch off with the kids.

There are two problems with this setup.  First, although Shari is learning at about double the speed per hour that I am, she’s still going slower because she’s in school far less.  That’s a minor problem, because we can switch off and have her take the classes and me work with a tutor, or whatever.  The big problem is that Shari is paying far more than I am.  Too much.

You see, we raised a certain amount of money for language training.  If we run out of money half way there – well, we can’t do that.

So Shari is looking for a new tutor that will fit in our price range.  We’re still glad we got her started, even if it was expensive, but now we need to find something more reasonable.

So it’s mostly a time and money issue.  We could learn the language much faster if we just both used tutors, but it would cost far more and we’d miss out on some of the great benefits of the university (such as the cultural training I’m getting).  Or, we could both do classes, which would be far cheaper, but it would take far longer – especially since we can’t both go to class at the same time!

So basically we’re trying to work out a compromise between these two extremes.  There are some good tutors available in the city, so we’ll be looking around for someone for Shari to try for the next month.  Then we have some time off in April, and we’ll decide how to go on when we start again in May.

I hope that’s as clear as Mexican hot chocolate!  Or maybe even clearer!  Just ask if you want to know more.

Most of you know by now that we still have our Calgary phone number (which means people are still calling offering to clean our furnace – even though we didn’t even have a furnace in Canada!).  That’s because we have an internet phone line through Vonage.  It was cheaper than the service we had before, it has more features, and, of course, we can still use a local Calgary number here in Cuernavaca.  Cool!

So if you’re in the local Calgary area, you can call us for free.  Also, if you have a Vonage phone, wherever you live, you can also call us for free.

We just got an email from Vonage offering another free service.  If you live in certain areas, you can call an access number and … that’s right, call us for free.  These access numbers are available in certain areas of Canada, France, Italy, Mexico, Spain, the UK and US.  That would include places like Edmonton, Dallas, Hamilton, Vernon, Sudbury, St Catharines, Winnipeg, Kitchener, Keystone Heights, Richmond Hill, Whitewater, Nashville, Pepperell, Dandrige … and many more.  We haven’t tried it – so call us and see if it works!

To see if there’s an access number in your area, visit this page on the Vonage site.

By the way, if you’re interested in getting a Vonage phone yourself, let us know.  They have one of those everyone-gets-a-deal-if-one-person-refers-another-deals.