This blogpost is not a request for money. However, it's time for those who know and love us to know that there are things happening in our lives that need prayerful attention.
Two factors are putting the "squeeze" on us. One is that I'm teaching fewer hours this semester. It's a good thing in so many ways, actually. University professors generally teach 16-20 classroom hours a week, and in the fall I was teaching 24. I asked the university if I could cut that back a bit for the spring (I teach outside of those hours in some other capacities as well as volunteering three nights a week at the Cafe, and we have many relationships flourishing that need our time). Well, they cut those hours back, all right! When we got back from Tet Holidays, they said "here's your schedule for the spring" and I had only 8 teaching hours in a week.
That's a good thing. I already have relationship with the classes they took off my teaching load, and those kids are still coming to the house for movies and games and borrowing books and going to the beach with us and all that. Way better to teach a lot in the fall and have empty time in the spring, when there are people in our lives to invest in. Tomorrow, for example, is a non-teaching day, and we get to spend it with one friend who is coming to hang out with us in the morning--it's a privilege to have this time to invest with our Vietnamese friends. But I was only ever paid $12.50 an hour for the teaching at the university, and 8 hours a week just isn't very much money to cover rent here, much less buy the return air-tickets for a family of five.
We weren't really counting on Vietnamese salary to cover big expenses, anyhow. Our house back in Bend has been rented out and provided a handsome cash-flow to cover expenses here. Those renters have now found an opportunity to move on by the end of April, and we are happy for them. But those last two months of rent money were going to a big part of how we were going to get home and get re-situated back stateside. Compared to the reduction in university salary this semester, and in addition to that diminished income, the loss of the rental income is a huge blow for us.
We are two months away from our departure date, so it's an acceptable time for us to begin selling off some of our belongings here. For example, today I listed our dryer on the Facebook expat group page, and a number of people are very interested in paying 7,000,000 VND for it. That's what we paid for it when we arrived, so that's great news. Oh, I should say that the seven million is just under $350--more than we'd pay for a used dryer in the US, right? But here things like appliances sometimes cost more.
Can I insert an aside here? Some things cost more, but lots of things cost WAY less. A student accidentally poured water on my laptop last fall, and I lost the functionality of my touchpad. I've been making-do with a radio keyboard and mouse, but then I ordered a laptop part from eBay and had Karen bring it with her when she came recently to visit. I took my computer and the part in to my laptop shop here, and the next day I was able to pick it up, trackpad fully repaired. They had to solder a cable to the trackpad inputs board, and they also opened up the display to install a new-used digitizer board, which didn't end up working. But I'm happy about the work they did, and I refused to pay only what they asked. They asked for 100,000 VND, which is less than $5. Can you imagine how much a laptop service would have cost (where micro-soldering of a cable was involved) in the USA? So I gave him half-again what he was wanting to charge. He's awesome, and at SEVEN DOLLARS I've had a steal of a deal in terms of laptop repair. Oh, actually I neglected to mention that he also repaired a kid-laptop trackpad clicker and threw that repair in with the original 100,000. What a guy. Sometimes it's awesome to live here!
So, back to our financial crisis. We recognize that our lives are not our own. We are living overseas, to be sure, but we're not doing anything here that we didn't do back at home. Kingdom-work is at the core of what our family does, whether in central Oregon or central Vietnam. Nobody should feel sorry for us or feel like we're way out on a limb "suffering" for a Cause. Yet we know there is a pleasure in supporting people who have traveled to a distant land to live as cultural ambassadors, and we are in a position to want some of that financial partnership if you're in a position to send it our way.
If you are a praying person, please do that. We suspect that our renters got their opportunity to move on as a result of our prayers and the prayers of some people who knew about their unhappiness in our home and the deteriorating landlord/tenant situation we were experiencing with them. We view their move as a direct answer to prayer, even though it crunches our finances here at the end of our year abroad.
Thanks for praying! Thanks for being our friends!
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