The South Africa Option

Thanks again to every single one of you for partnering with us in the genesis of our frontier missions effort. Thanks, too, for those of you who through your generous gifts and faithful prayers have gotten us this far. We had hoped to be announcing our plans with confidence yesterday to be attending our initial candidate YWAM training at the end of this month, but we find that we are still on hold for now. I hope you are ready to pray, because we are inviting you now to pray over the following details.

We were just informed that the YWAM training in Texas may be canceled due to lack of enrollment, so we are now setting our sights more firmly on the South African option, which starts July 4^th. We have been very focused on getting to Texas, so we are now turning the big bus which is the Baldwin family to Africa. We move fast when necessary.

Please pray that we will receive confirmation of our acceptance into their program and that the South African office will be able to quickly issue our necessary travel visas without hindrance. We didn't need travel visas to Texas. You can get more information about the YWAM base here: http://www.ywamworcester.org.za/index.html

Please pray that our frequent flier donation will get all five of us all the way to Capetown, South Africa and back, and save us the expense of the outgoing travel fees. We would then apply this surplus to the other areas of need.

The good news is we have our full tuition for the program in South Africa. We are very close now to having all we need in support for the whole training experience, including the outreach portion, and yet we have fallen a bit short and behind schedule. If you are reading this and just forgot to make a pledge, call or email us. That would be a big help for our planning.

Pray for the following financial needs and prayerfully consider participating especially if you have not yet already done so.

$8181 for training

$1800 in outgoing expenses

$800/month more in ongoing monthly support while we are away.

We also ran into some problems with our kids passports that we need to deal with quickly. Turns out the US needs different birth certificate forms, so we are hoping to remedy this situation asap.

We are waiting on a diagnosis for Sam's health condition that we hope is treatable. For those of you who don't know, the doctor fears he may have an ulcer.

Steve may need some quick, minor surgery to remove a cyst before leaving the country. The doctor doesn't want it to burst while away from close by hospitals. We hope that this minor procedure doesn't significantly contribute to the medical debt we are working on paying off before we leave. So you can also pray for our ability to eliminate our medical debt before departure.

Pray that we can find a more affordable international health insurance option.

Our hope is also to leave with a good Mac laptop so we can stay in touch with you, store our photos, and do some video editing of our trip. Perhaps we can even make some more videos as part of our outreach to African communities (We've done that sort of thing before...) Toward that end we are also praying for a good digital camera (Steve will shot video of course, but Allyson would like to document our adventure with photos!) These items are currently beyond our budget.

We are running out of time to book the planes, quit our jobs, move out of the Hospitality House, store the rest of our stuff, and make all the necessary final arrangements to go. We can do it all in the time we have left if we are very focused and receive the momentum to continue moving forward.

So until then we are going to pray and wait. Please join us in this adventure of patience.

Thanks! And please do send us your prayer requests, we are praying for you, too!