Anxiously Engaged in Kiribati

 Three of our projects were approved for funding this past week! (Yeah! It's "happy dance" time) Project CURE, the school of nursing computer network, and the eye clinic were approved by the area presidency. They are smaller amount projects so they don't need to go to SLC. We are still waiting for our emergency response project to be approved. It usually takes only 2 days to get approval and it has now been 3-4 weeks. I think it's lost somewhere.  I keep asking about it, and our "boss" keeps telling me to be patient, it's at the area presidency. I just feel bad because these families are needing help now. The good news is that when you don't have much, and you lose it all, you haven't lost much.  The Kiribati people are a very resilient people and are already rebuilding their lives.     We have 4 more projects we are working on. One is to build an accessible toilet for the Community for the Disabled  .  We met with them today. I love the work...

 It happened again today. When we need to talk to someone specific and they just happen to walk by right when we needed them.  This happens at least once a week.  Let me give you just a few recent examples. Today we walked to the hospital to speak to Grace who is our contact person to get the road put in.  It started to rain so we slipped under a transport stop and waited for the rain to stop. When we got there, Grace said we needed to get the Secretary to the Ministry of Health (Head Honch) to "sign off" on it. Today was the only day the secretary would be in town. So we walked up to her office to make an appointment, thinking it will take at least a week or two to get in to see her, and there she is coming out of another meeting . She welcomes us into her office and long story short, the road project will go out for tender today!  If it had not rained we would have missed her and the project would be delayed yet again. We are trying to make this year's budget ...