June 2008

June Financial Update

Dear Friends,

When it comes to reporting our financial needs, we hesitate. Money can be a touchy subject. We do not want to offend. We never want to come across as not being grateful for all you have allowed us to do in Niger.

Current Financial Needs

However, since many of you have asked to be updated as financial needs arise, we would like to let you know our current support levels. Probably, there is no better way than to jump right in...

At this point, we are well behind where we should be in our projected support. We have been in Niger for 6 months, or 33% of the time of this current term, but we have received, as of our last statement 30% of the support we need, which does not sound so bad, but the 30% includes the support raised when we were home in the last half of 2007! Our monthly levels have always fluctuated quite a bit since most of our partners are individuals and a few churches, but at this point, we still need $55,000 in gifts to cover the next 12 months! We are not in a panic, because we know, in faith that the Lord can raise up those to cover that shortfall, and even do it on one day if He so desires.

We pray that the Lord would indeed provide those needs so that we can continue to minister to missionaries and Nigeriens through technical and educational support, friendship ministries and discipleship.

Could you be part of that answer to prayer? If you prayerfully feel you could help us help those in Niger, through our ministry, please see below. Perhaps you would consider introducing us to your congregation or Missions director? If you can not contribute financially, we would still covet your prayers for us. We thank the Lord for each of you!

Sincerely,

Randy Potratz for Wanda, Chris, Justin and Noah

Did you know you can now help support our ministry online?

Just go to https://apps.easydraft.com/Payment/SIM/

Other information you will need:

Our Name: Randy and Wanda Potratz

Our SIM Account Number: 65825

First of June links

Hey! Welcome to a little feature I'd like to add that gives you a few links once in a while from the internet. The internet is a wild and woolly place, but I would like to give you the inside track on some of the sites I found interesting, and family friendly. The category will be called "Links From The 'Net"

Title: max-width in Internet Explorer
Description: Most web-developers know that IE has fallen behind in the race for standards and being able to show the latest and greatest...
http://www.svendtofte.com/code/max_width_in_ie

Title: What is Elisa?
Description: Elisa is an open source cross-platform Media Center connecting the internet to your all-in-one media player.
http://elisa.fluendo.com/home/

Description: Robots.txt is a text file present in the root directory of a site which is used to control which pages are indexed by a robot. If you use the 'disallow' word you can block parts of your sites to be found by search engines.
http://howto.helpero.com/howto/Find-Secret-Sites-And-Articles_134.html

Title: TrafficControlAndReport (for IPCOP)
Description: This MOD is a billing system for workgroups. It's dedicated to tariffication of traffic downloaded by GREEN interface users. It's also dedicated to control access to ipcop box.
http://firewalladdons.sourceforge.net/trafcontrol.html

Description: Play around with a web based software kaleidescope

http://www.zefrank.com/dtoy_vs_byokal/index.html