Fundraising Sunday

Because Friday is for PLAYING!

Anyway, so with the sale of $50 worth of jewelry (!!!) (including my first sale to a stranger, wahooo), and with a little we put in from my last paycheck, our next fee is paid for again! YAY! Now all we're waiting on is our danged 171H (our USCIS approval) to come. I BEEEELIEEEEVE it will come this week or I WILL have a hissy fit. I'm just being up-front about it.

Anyway, I thought I'd take the time to go over the rest of our fees, just to give you an idea of what the process is like and where the money goes. All in all I'd say we have over $19,500 left to raise (which makes people's eyes bug out, myself included). As you'll see, that's mostly travel costs.

Money we've put in so far: ~$4200 (I can only approximate because I wasn't super-organized about things like gas money, stamps, printing costs, and the like. Maybe next time? Probably not; it's just hard for me to be that organized)

Our next fee (that I so hope we can pay by this weekend!): $3,000

Expenses down the road:

Agency fees left: $3,500
Lawyer and court fee: $2,500
Orphanage services/humanitarian aid: $2,250
Baby A's visa: $230 (the Department of State lowered this fee by $174!)
In-country medical exam (required for visa): $100
Document mailing US-Uganda-US-Uganda, etc: $300
Immunizations: $400 (only a couple are expensive, but boy are they!)
Airfare estimate: $6,000 (round trip for us 3 + one way for baby A)
Ugandan visas for 3: $150
Lodging for 30 days: $1,800 (we'll be there 3-5 weeks)
Food estimate: $300
Car service estimate: $1,000 (seems crazy expensive! but what are you gonna do with two little ones?)
Court report for re-adoption in the US: $500
Citizenship certificate: $550

GRAND TOTAL left: $19,580

Holey moley that's a lot of money. But you know what? God has all the money in the world (literally He's in control of it all). If He wanted to plop it in our laps tomorrow, it wouldn't be difficult for Him. I think He won't, but if there's one thing I've learned in the last seven years, it's that God loves for His will to be accomplished through His people. And God loves adoption.

As I know there's been a bit of confusion (totally my fault): we won't close our His Kids, Too! grant until we have our 171H because we can't. I wish I could and send it to our agency so it was taken care of and done, but we can't until we have a bill from the agency, and they can't send that until we have our USCIS approval.

[also, you may notice that the airfare is a huge amount of the cost. I have no idea how airline miles work, but if you wanted to donate those to us, I'll try real hard to use them! ;)]