The Week's News

Dear Everyone,
Hope this note finds you all well. We are doing well. Kaitlyn seems to be almost completely over her cough. We were worried about her for a while because it just seemed to be getting worse for about 2 weeks. The antibiotic seemed to clear it up, though and she's doing well. Thanks for your prayers!
I think the last we sent e-mail was Saturday. We were here in town for a school picnic. It went very well, and I think everyone had a good time. We played volley ball, then there was bag races, including one for the board and fathers. The students had a couple relay races carrying an egg on a spoon stuck in their mouths. Fortunately the egg shells were unusually tough, so there weren't too many casualties!
Sunday I preached at Matukeng, then we went to Uncle Piet and Aunt Hester's for a meal and meeting with the rest of the missionaries and Mr. Howard. The meeting was profitable, and we enjoyed being with everyone. We spent the night there and left at seven the next morning to take Mr. Howard to the airport in Bloemfontein. After he left Steph and I did several errands then went to a big building supply place to buy ready-made"devil's fork" fence for the school. (It's a steel fence made out of welded angle iron. It's low maintenance and fairly secure.) I had our double cab with Uncle Piet's big trailer. Unfortunately the fence panels were longer than the trailer, so the load was heavier at the back of the trailer which made it "wag it's tail." I only drove about 45-50 mph on the way home and we had to stop once to retie the load. It wasn't a relaxing experience, but by God's mercy we made it safely to Uncle Piet's about 7:00pm. We picked up Munchkin at Uncle Johan's then headed for home.
Tuesday I welded brackets to support a sink at the clinic and made a frame to support the new solar panels I bought several weeks ago. I got the solar panels installed on the roof before a late supper, then climbed up in the attic to do the wiring after supper. Wednesday I went to a TEE meeting in Maseru, worked some more on getting school uniforms made for orphans and preached at the Bible Study. The project for the orphans is kind of dragging on. Communication is slow to some of the pastors, and we've had a little trouble finding the cloth for some of the uniforms. I think it's because the schools just opened, so the cloth sold out when everyone was getting new uniforms.
Steph has been working on catching up our bookkeeping. We got behind on it when we were in America over Thanksgiving, so it has been a formidable task. The program we use for it on our computer isn't really adequate, so that adds to the problems.
Thursday we left Matukeng about 6:30 am to go to Bloemfontein for an appointment for Steph at the cardiologist. Michelle went with us to try to get her residence permit. Unfortunately she didn't have one letter worded right, another one wasn't on a letter head, etc. etc. so she has to try again next week. Very frustrating, but quite normal for Africa! For some reason the cardiologist was badly behind, so we kept rescheduling the appointment for later and later in the day. Finally about 3:30 we went in and still had to wait quite a while to see the doctor. We think maybe he had to attend to an emergency surgery in the morning or something like that.
The doctor did give Steph a good report on her heart. He is still convinced that her damaged valve was not the cause of the stroke. He says the damage is very minimal and that chamber of the heart is not enlarged much at all. He took her off warfrin and put her on a half aspirin a day. He is very confident that the valve will never give her any trouble the rest of her life. He did prescribe a battery of blood tests to try to find what caused the stroke, but they can't be done until a month after she stops taking the warfrin. I guess we'll see. It's always tough when specialists disagree.
Last night we spent the night at van der Merwe's. We had a relaxing evening and enjoyed being with them. This morning we had missionary prayer meeting at 6:00am then came to town.

Hope you all have a good weekend!
Glenn, Steph and Kaitlyn