Today is my brother Ric’s birthday. I am not sure how old he is; if I knew how old I was I probably could figure it out. No need to trouble my mind with such trivial stuff! Ha! Our family has bunches of March birthdays.
Steve and I spent about 3 hours this morning trying to get the GRA (Ghana Revenue Authority) Withholding tax paid. They have implemented a new policy by which all taxes have to be entered online; you cannot pay them online but all the data has to be entered into the Child Center’s portal and uploaded to the GRA website. Please! Many of the businesses do not even have computers. The payments can be made through a mobile phone, debit card or with cash at the bank. We got everything entered and uploaded but could not figure out how to generate a unique code to actually pay the tax. We took the computer to the GRA office so they could show us what to do. Obviously we were not explaining ourselves very well because they reentered the data and we were charged twice for the same thing. They think there is a way to delete one of the entries but we are not sure if that will ever happen. They said it was not a big deal but you know that is just the sort of thing that will come back to bite you! After we got the Withholding tax paid we asked about the tax on the apartment that we stayed in when we came into Ghana. After much talking and going back to the mission house to get the last tax receipt they generated another form to take to the bank. Steve went to the bank 3 times before they got the code right! The worst part is that we are not through yet. We still have to pay the employees monthly tax on their earnings. We will try that tomorrow; our brains are fried for today! We have no idea how Mr. Iddrisu is going to pay the taxes while we are home on leave. The man at GRA said he would work with him on it. And no, we cannot pay the taxes early!
First thing this morning Steve and I went to the back field to water the new cement blocks. The blocks are molded very dry and have to be watered or they will crumble. This afternoon we had to chase a herd of sheep out of the field because if they step on the blocks they will break them; that is how soft the blocks are at this stage. Red hired a tanker to come this afternoon and spray water on the blocks.
We had to order 3000 more bags of drinking water today! The workers are using so much water because the weather is so hot and dry! The high temperature today was 109 degrees! It is almost 6:00 pm and the sun is going down and it is still 101 degrees.
Thank you for the love, prayers and support.
In His Service,
Steve and Kandie
