We have a house!

The past couple weeks have been a whirlwind of activity.  The house that we had been hoping to move into fell through, which was very disappointing.  We then chose a different house, closer to the school, about a week ago.  Over 5 days we packed up our whole house, moved 3 gates down, and have tried to unpack as much as possible.  Tonight we are finally starting to feel moved in, but there will still be much to do when we return in August.  Also during the last week, we finished classes and packed up our classrooms, said goodbye to many friends, and found a new home for our dog (also known as dog-dog to Juliana!).  We are now in need of some rest!

In the morning we leave for Nebraska, arriving on Wednesday evening.  We hear there is a lot of flooding in eastern Nebraska, so hopefully that won't affect our flights.  We're also praying that Juliana will do well on the flights.  This is the first time flying with a very active toddler (last summer she wasn't yet crawling).  I imagine we'll be spending a lot of time walking the aisles :)

Juliana's bedroom

Kitchen (way bigger than I had before!)

Living room and dining room

Big Changes

 So we have finally decided to enter the world of blogging!  The main reason that we have decided to do this is because we have some big changes coming up in the near future and we'd like to keep our friends and family up-to-date and also to ask for your support!  (Just in case you're wondering--the big changes do not include a new baby.)

First of all, we will be moving out of our house in the next 2 1/2 - 3 weeks.  We don't yet have a place to move to but it has become very obvious that we need to move to a place with fewer problems.  For those of you who don't know, here are just a few of the problems that we're dealing with:

• Sewer problems - The septic system has backed up as well as tree roots growing into the pipes.
• Water - Most people here have a reservior tank on their roof with an extra supply of water for when the water turns off, but our house doesn't have one.  When the landlord was asked about it, the response was that we never lose water!  However during much of the past year we have lost water several times a week.
• Robberies - This fall someone broke into our house at night while we were in bed.  While we didn't didn't discover the robbery until the next morning, it was still very scary.  Other homes in the area have also been robbed, and because Kyle has to travel several times a year for his job, we simply don't feel safe with Melodee and Juliana being home alone.
• The last straw! - Last Friday a friend invited us to spend the night at his house.  When we returned Saturday morning we discovered that a tree had fallen on our roof during a bad storm the night before.  Our house doesn't have shingles on the roof, instead many houses here have "tiles" on the roof which crack pretty easily.  The tiles cracked the whole way along the roof and everything in our living room/dining room/office/kitchen was completely soaked and sitting in water.  The school came and put some temporary tiles on top of the broken ones and we were able to save most things.  However the roof still leaks a little, there are other trees around our house that could potentially fall, and we simply need a place with not quite so many problems!

We have a couple townhouses that we have looked at this week and are waiting to hear if either of them would work.  Another option could be to move into an apartment on the school campus.  If we don't find a place that we can move into right away we will be moving all of our things into a school classroom for the summer before we fly out on June 21st.  We're hoping to at least have a house available before we leave.  This means we also need to find a new home very quickly for our VERY energetic dog, Gideon.  Please pray that we would find someone who would appreciate him and have a large area for him to run around in.  He has always been very determined to escape from whatever pen he is in, so we are hoping that he won't escape from his future new home and become a street dog.

Our second, and even bigger change, is that Melodee will not be teaching during this next school year.  This year we have had an excellent nanny who takes very good care of Juliana.  But as Juliana has gotten older, we've started to see the need for Melodee to be home with her, guiding her through these very formative years.  While we are very excited for Melodee to not have to do 2 full time jobs, this is also a little scary because we will be dropping to about half of our former monthly paycheck.  On the other hand, we have seen God take care of us over and over again this year and we're excited to see what he'll do in the future. 

However, we don't want to enter into this alone.  Most importantly we are asking for your prayer support.  We don't want to enter this new stage in our life without knowing that our friends and family are praying for us.

Secondly, we are asking you to consider supporting us financially.  After looking at our budget we feel that we can come very close to covering our normal day-to-day expenses with Kyle's paycheck.  And since Melodee will not be working it will eliminate a few of our previous expenses, but if we have to move further away from the school it will increase some of our other expenses (such as gas, which is over $5/gallon!).  We also need to take into account college loans that both of us are still paying for, as well as other expenses that come up, such as doctor's visits and car repairs.  After looking very closing at our budget we believe we need to raise about $500 per month.  Would you please prayerfully consider supporting us monthly?

If you would like to know more about what we are doing in Honduras, we would love to meet with you if we are in your area this summer!  We will be flying into Nebraska on June 22nd, and flying out of Denver on July 9th.  We will then be in Hawaii until August 8th.  We will be calling many of you anyways to meet up with, but feel free to contact us too!

If you would like to support us financially, there are 3 ways that you can do this.  We will explain this on the side of our blog, or you can visit www.ripeforharvest.org/donations.htm for additional information.  Our account number is #189 and is in Kyle's name.


We hope to be seeing you this summer!