And how is your work going? ...what is it you do, anyway?

Some of you have actually asked me about my work here.  Thanks!  To be honest, I haven't talked much about it because, um, well, I'm basically a bookkeeper, and how fascinating is that?  I mean, at the end of the day, my roomie, Heidi, talks about her trip to the village, and how her teaching went, and how one of the women actually named her new baby girl Heidi.  (She also talks about driving past the remains of the goat that the village just fed her for lunch, but that's another story.)  I talk about the cool new spreadsheet I'm working on that tracks every budget category for the team.  Okay, now, show of hands.  Who has the more interesting story?  Heidi? or MB?  I rest my case.    

Now, don't get me wrong - I enjoy what I do, and I am quite happy to serve the Lord by serving the team as their bookkeeper.  I just don't have any illusions as to how engrossing the topic is to most other people.  But for those of you who asked, here goes.  For those of you who didn't ask, you have my permission to skip this blog.  If you hang on to the end of the blog, though, I'll throw in a freebie photo.

The concept is fairly simple:  I handle the money for most of the various projects of the team.  I won't bore you with a list, but so far I have taken over tracking for ten different projects.  Quite a lot for the team to have been keeping up with on their own, you say?  You're absolutely right, and thank you very much for sending me over here to help them.  Here's what I've done so far:  I have set up Quickbooks accounts to track the funds in a way that I can run accounting reports, if necessary, for any of the ministries.  I have also set up tracking spreadsheets in Excel, because that seems to present the information in a way that is more helpful to the missionaries.  So basically I do two things:  take the money-handling burden off the missionaries to free them to do their work, AND track the money under accepted accounting principles. (Kind of got my fingers crossed on that second item!)  

However, there is one little wrinkle:  When I say I handle the money, I mean I HANDLE the money.  You see, everything here is done on a cash basis - EVERYTHING.  There's no way to tell you how that complicates life.  For starters, every bill, every payroll (of which I handle five), must be paid in cash, so I must get receipts and have people sign for their cash.  Two, when I'm trying to reconcile the accounts, I'm actually counting piles of shillings, which takes ten times as long as just adding columns of numbers.  (And you would not believe how yucky and stinky Ugandan money is.  Since Uganda is a cash society, money changes hands constantly.  If you want to get an idea, take the oldest, dirtiest dollar bill you can find, throw it in a mud puddle, and then rub it in the dirt.  Okay, Ugandan money is worse than that.  Really.) Last but not least, there are 1,580 shillings to the dollar - today, at least - which means, if I'm counting $3,000, I'm counting 4,740,000 Ugandan shillings, and that's a lot of shillings.  Thank goodness, Uganda's lowest paper currency is a 1,000 shilling note.  But still, Ugandan money takes up quite a bit of space.  Sometimes when I'm counting out money for something and there's twenty piles of shilling notes and coins sitting in front of me, I feel remarkably like Scrooge before his reformation.  

So that's what I do for the team.  Don't you think it is quite cool that the Lord found a way for me to get to serve Him overseas with what we shall loosely call my skill set?  Me too.

Okay, for those of you who hung on this long, here is the photo I promised you.  Remember, I mentioned that one of the village women actually named her baby girl after Heidi?  Here is a photo of Heidi, Heidi, and (little) Heidi's mom. 

Heidi with her namesake, Heidi, and Mom