Whole lotta cash!

One of the things of living in a "2nd/3rd world" world is that some transactions are still in cash.
Since we moved here back in April, we have had the generous loan of three different cars and had put off buying a car since we were hoping that our residence visas were going to come "soon". Registering a car in someone else's name is a hassle for all parties involved and if we were just going to turn around and reverse the process to put the car in our name a few weeks later, it didn't seem worth it.

Well here we are 6 months later finally buying a car (= In cash!

Once we decided on the car it took a mere 24 hours to open the bank account here in town, transfer money to my dad, to friends here the country, from their account to our new account and to withdraw it all! We needed to add the step of using our friend's account because of the different weekends between the US and here. We knew we needed one full day for our account to work, and by that time the US banks would have probably closed and we would have had to wait several more days.

Some things can go so much faster than in the US and some things are slower. There is no predicting what category something will fall into. I would not have predicted 'financial gymnastics' to be in the fast category.

Because Tom was opening a new account and trying to transfer a chunk of american dollars, the bank manager now things we have some sort of wasta (= The combination of that and taking Layla into the bank has made sure that we will be remembered (=

All in all, we are so grateful for the resources to do this, the resources of friends' we've used along the way and for His provision of it ALL.

We're not trying to teach Layla to love money here...it's just that there aren't many ways to make pictures of cash interesting (=