robhindman.com News and thoughts from the Hindman family

The Latest from Here (part 2)

Continuing from yesterday's part 1, here are more updates in regard to:

Previous sponsoring church: Sun Valley's partnership in our support is officially over at the end of this month -- in two days. As a congregation we wish them the best and we will continue to be blessed by many wonderful friendships there. They've transitioned about half of their Ukraine mission account balance to Legacy (the church managing our funds on an interim basis) and the rest is supposed to be transitioned by, well, two days from now. 

Logistics: Assuming that our relationship with our sponsoring church would be at least the intended 6 years, if not for a lifetime, in early 2008 we moved almost all of our stateside logistical roots to the Phoenix area - mailing address, voter's registration, driver's licenses, etc. In the last month or two we've done as much as we can from 7,600 miles away to pick those roots back up. Denyce's sister and brother-in-law in Texas are now temporarily handling our mail. Voter registration and driver's licenses will have to wait until we are in the States, I think. We still have a filing cabinet storage box at the Sun Valley church building that we're going to have to get to Texas one way or another too. 

Next sponsoring church: Who knows? I've written up a document articulating what we're looking for in a sponsoring church and we've sent that to a couple of places. We've been thinking and talking about various scenarios, and are looking into each of them, including such possibilities as:

• A church that already knows us and supports us taking on the role of sponsor in addition to their existing financial support.
• A church that has no financial resources to offer currently, but already knows us and would be eager to take on the spiritual, emotional, and logistical role of oversight.
• A church we've had no previous relationship with becoming our sponsor. This would require more time to establish the relationship, naturally, but we need to be open to that.
• One church has asked about possibly becoming a temporary sponsor all the way until our next furlough, but for now we are favoring taking the time to find a long-term sponsor sooner.

Support need: Since we got the news from Sun Valley, we have been blessed with a few new monthly supporters who have stepped up as the first part of replacing the support we are losing. As of right now we are still a little over $2,200 per month short, and we will be continuing to work on that.

Fundraising/Birthing plans: Before all of this came down in March, we had already made plans to go to Austria to have the baby later this summer. That is because 1) the medical care is very good there, 2) the cost of the care is lower there than in the US, and 3) our Ukrainian visas expire in August, which means our whole family has to leave Ukraine to obtain new visas at that time anyway. However, in the wake of our support situation now, and considering the input of some of our other partners and advisors, it seems like it might make the most sense to go ahead and travel back to the US to have the baby so that we can pursue in person whatever support opportunities can be available during that time. We haven't actually booked tickets to the US or cancelled arrangements in Austria yet, but we will likely be doing that this week. We'll keep you posted on this.