Humanitarian Projects

We submitted three projects in March, and all were approved. By today, all the equipment has been delivered. We will have small ceremonies at each project site and will follow the progress for a few months and write a report before each project is considered complete, but it feels wonderful to be at this point.

Two of our projects involved desks and equipment for schools. One school is for mentally disabled students, and the other is a regular public school. Both schools were woefully lacking in equipment, and our gift does not remedy the situation completely. It does, however, encourage local participation and support. Before the equipment was installed, the rooms were painted by parents and local service agencies. The third project involved computers for blind students.

We knew there would be challenges on our mission, but we are surprised at the challenge bookkeeping is! Our project funds are provided through an account managed in Salt Lake City, and of course it is in dollars. Turkey runs on a cash economy—in Turkish lira, of course. The exchange rate changes every day, and since our business is never concluded in one day, the exchange rate may change several times between the bid, the order, the payment, and finally the reimbursement to our account in Salt Lake City. To make it even more difficult, most suppliers want to be paid in dollars. Our account is in dollars, but getting dollars out of the account is quite tricky. All banks will withdraw money from the account, convert it to TL, then sell us dollars. With all the exchanges, it's hard to figure out exactly what anything has cost! To make it more difficult, getting dollars is difficult. We finally found an ATM that will dispense dollars, but not the amount we need. To pay our last supplier, we went to the ATM, several banks, and then the money exchange place. You don’t even want to know what life is like around our apartment when we’re trying to balance our account! We have a record of what we spent in lira, but that amount never matches what appears on our bank statement in dollars. Here is Ron counting out $5,000 cash--with a few hundred TL, too.