Wanted to share this again with you all.
A Greater Hope NGO has been in the market to purchase solar panels for the ministry, we’ve made a small effort in raising money and asking for help to make this happen with some success.

To refresh you on this or maybe it’s your first time hearing about this.
Our electric bill is now around $850 a month, as well the country has had a lot of problems with providing constant electricity and the quality of electricity has been very low.

We have multiply change overs that happen regularly on who provides power during the day.  In the morning and evening we thing we get our power from the capital city, but during peek times we believe we’re switched to power from Vietnam.  This on and off switches causes a lot of damage to anything running and we have no idea when they will happen.  Last year we had to have a lot of air conditioner units repaired from shutting on and off while they were running in the team houses.

Last year, which is also expected this year we had/will have rolling black outs, 4 to 6 hours a day, which cause us tremendous problems with heat and children in class as well as our food storage and ability to produce meals.

So to one day cut cost, to immediately solve power being switched and avoid the black outs we’ve really pushed to get solar panels installed this year, before more outages and damage occurs.

So we did raise 1/5th of the funds we sought.
We ended up signing a $50,000 usd loan with the bank yesterday and we should be approved in a week and have panels being brought to the school the following week.
We’re on schedule to have solar electricity before April, and available 24 hrs. a day.

So some details.  Originally we were seeking about $25,k in past posts, but once we actually got companies coming out to the property the estimates doubled.  We went with 1 company out of the 4 we had quote us.  They where not my first choice as one company came across much more professional but they wanted to charge us $10,k in tax while the other company the tax was included.  So really between the two best quotes it came down to price.

We are installing in two phases.
Phase 1 the school portion will go in, we’ll take the week to see if we’re happy and everything was accurate.  Phase one will cost us $32,000.
Phase two will happen the following week on our brick building where some classrooms are, the team houses are and the children’s home is at.  I have to check again on the sheet but I believe it will cost us $20,000 on the second phase.

The lone we got will cost us $1,100 a month, slightly more than our current bill for I think 5 years.
We’ve raised/have a had a gift given from a California church of $10,000 wired to us yesterday.

So a couple things here.  We still need to build a roof on the church/ball court.  We have enough cash to pay for it according to our last quote for the roof.  Or we’ll consider paying a large part of the loan off immediately cutting our monthly payment perhaps.
We would save some cash as well to cover any needs as we Cambodia is facing an economic crisis.
There are a lot of options in the air of what steps well take and where we’ll spend, produce or save.

Main things from this post is not only to update you on what we’re doing, but to let you know we could most certainly use help still.
We’ve in Cambodia 15 years now and have never needed a loan to produce something so it’s a rather large step for us and honestly we’d like to pay it off tomorrow.
With the countries current power issues we’re not going to be able to have 860 people toughing things out this summer in a classrooms made of metal and average temperatures reaching in the hundreds.  The cost to accomplish this isn’t far off from our current costs so we felt it was the right step to take.

If you want to help us out on this still feel free to donate on our (support page) or contact us if you need on our (contact page).
If you would like to pray that everything is built right, and we are able to cover all these cost and make right choices feel free to share your thought on our facebook post.

Thank you all so much,