Good news-Bad news-Sorry-Thank you!

Let's start with the good news because that's always fun!! The bathrooms are coming along. They got their bright green roof today and we are excited! We took most of July and August off from building because Jeff and I were in the states and we were blowing through construction money like crazy. We all felt it would be best to wait and make decisions together so we could sit down as a team and discuss what we wanted to do and what we were willing to cut out (like tile).

The girls' side (on the left) will have 10 toilets and 5 showers and the boys’ side (on the right) will have 8 toilets, 5 urinals, and 5 showers. These bathrooms will also support all conferences and field trips to play on the playground.

Several months ago we started a fundraiser for these toilets (18 toilets, 6 urinals, with 10 showers) and 2 classrooms. The bad news is that the toilets have used all of the funds we raised. We ran into 2 main problems and a few small ones. First the total cost for the septic system was over $6,000 which was a good bit over what we had estimated, but it had to be done because we don't have any type of city water and sewage way out here in the village. The second problem is that our contractor hasn't ever built anything like this (we showed him pictures and added and altered as necessary) so there were many things not understood and therefore left off of the original estimate. Just for example, the 6 metal poles you see at the front were over $600 and not on the original estimate. These bathrooms have to be built in order for us to tear down the current toilets so that we have room to build 2 more classrooms that MCA needs. Even if we had known beforehand that the bathrooms would be so costly we would have had to still move forward with the project because we are out of room to add classrooms without demolishing the current toilets which are just holes in the ground.

A smaller issue I realized while crunching numbers (because the cost of these toilets has me pretty stressed) is that we haven't been allocating enough funds for transportation when we do big builds like this. Since we don't have a truck we have to pay for everything (60 plus bags of cement, 2,000+ cement blocks etc) to be delivered and is always multiple trips. So far on these toilets we have spent over $800 on just getting supplies to our campus. Since we aren't in town we pay more to get things to us in the village.

All that to say we need to raise more money for the classrooms so all of our students at MCA can learn in an actual classroom. In 2019 we started MCA with NO classrooms and today we have 8 fully functioning classrooms and a large pavilion. Clearly God has provided for our campus over and over again. However, right now we have 2 classes that are meeting under the pavilion. This is just a temporary "fix", we need to get them classrooms built, but we can't do it without raising the necessary funds.

Asking for money isn't something that I take lightly. I'm very aware that money doesn't grow on trees. I am also aware that we have technically already raised money for this classroom project. I'm sorry we didn't have a better estimate the first time we fundraised for this, we have made cuts along the way to try and get this wrapped up and these toilets in use. Unfortunately, almost nothing goes according to plan here and we are almost always left trying to figure out "what now?".

Thank you for continuing to stand with us and for our students. The potential life change here is incredible and a huge responsibility. You are helping children go to school, who would be sitting at home otherwise. Children who would be skipping meals are now getting 2 meals and a snack each school day. Lots of our students get medical care because when they are sick we send them to the Dr. We have 5 students in particular who have required medical care that their families haven't been able to afford but because they attend MCA they were able to get what they needed. And most importantly, they are taught and hear the Word of God daily.

We set up a new fundraiser on our page you can view it here and as always you can ask any and all questions you may have via email, or Facebook.