Then the ones who pleased the Lord will ask, "When did we give you something to eat or drink? When did we welcome you as a stranger or give you clothes to wear or visit you while you were sick or in jail?"
The King will answer, "Whenever you did it for any of my people, no matter how unimportant they seemed, you did it for me." .......Matthew 25

Saturday, May 1, 2010

BASP - money matters and security

Working in rural Cambodia presents challenges in different ways.

One is the relatively weak level of formal accounting procedures available for the management of money in the projects we do. While we have been fortunate in that we have been able so far to be able to trust the people we work with - namely Esther and the local pastors, we do recognize that our donors do expect a tighter level of accounting for the financial management of our projects. For this purpose, I have set up an Advisory Committee who will help provide the oversight for the financial management and accounting practices for the projects. While these may not be as detailed as is practiced in Singapore, it does provide some way of ensuring that donors expectations are matched by the utilization of money on the ground.

Another difficulty we are recognizing is that there is a real security issue with respect to the movement of large amounts of money during the implementation of projects of the ground. Here in Singapore we can can make use of electronic resources and operate cashlessly, but in rural Cambodia, transactions are based on hard cash. The movement of large amounts on USD in the form of hard cash carries a significant level of risk. This was made very real recently when Esther had her bag snatched, losing a large amount of money, handphones and a camera.

Please pray for us and the staff in Cambodia, that God will grant us the wisdom in dealing with these problems.



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