We left the mission house shortly after 6:00 this morning. We headed to Tamale; our main purpose in coming to Tamale was to turn in the Social Welfare report for the renewal of the Child Center’s license. We drove 2 vehicles today because we are having a new A/C hose put on the unit in the blue van and we are having the windows tinted to help keep the van cooler. The air conditioning unit has a hard time heating all that wide open space in the van. I like to be cool when I travel! The repair guy, Issac, said he would be at his shop by 8:00 am. Well, we arrived at 8:15 am and there was no sign of him. One of his workers was there but he was not; I guess he was working on “African” time. We waited around for 45 minutes and he finally showed up. He said he wanted us to wait a bit longer because the guy that tints the windows was on his way and we needed to negotiate the price with him. The guy finally came and then we headed to the Social Welfare office to find out which bank we needed to go to and how much the renewal fee was going to be. The lady told us that we could go to any bank and get a bank draft. We went to our bank because we got a message from the bank a few days ago that said we had to take our non-citizen cards to the bank in person to update our records. Their computer system was not working very well; they needed to take our picture; after about an hour they sent us to the manager and he finally got our pictures taken. Then came the problem of getting the bank draft. They tried a repeated number of times with no success. Finally, they sent us away and told us that they would call when and if the system started working again. We decided to try another bank but that bank said they could not make a bank draft for us unless we had an account with them. Shortly before closing time, we went back to the bank because we had not received a call. The guy said the system was working and he was able to input the information but it was really not working. The bank manager said that if they could not get it to work tomorrow, they might have to send the information to one of their branch offices, have them print the bank draft and then have them send it up to Tamale. The guy said that if he did that, he was not sure how long it would take to get it to Tamale. Really! We are supposed to send the report in this week! We went back to the Social Welfare office and asked for advice; they said there was no other method of payment that could be accepted except for a bank draft. They told us to check with all the other banks in Tamale and see if anyone would let us buy a bank draft without having an account. It is a good thing we brought 2 vehicles and had decided to spend the night just in case we ran into any unforeseen problems.
We had a very nice supper tonight!
Please pray that we can get a bank draft tomorrow!
In HIS Service,
Steve, Kandie and Skeeter
P.S. Skeeter has nothing to say tonight because he is too sad, lonely and depressed to talk right now!
