Joe will be in Colorado from March 11 through 20. Since many of the recipients of this newsletter are in Colorado, we wanted to be sure you knew that he might be around and hope that you will look for him. His plan is to be in Colorado Springs the weekend of the 11-12 and in Longmont the 17th to 20th. In between he will be at the Christian Management Association meeting in downtown Denver. So, if you have a small group meeting or similar event, please invite him to give you an update on the work of Wycliffe.

Jerry had a successful implementation for the payroll system for our direct-hire employee staff. That is about 150 out of our 4000+ employees counting the members of the mission. After many hours of testing and revising the software with the vendor, they got a correct payroll produced. (We all like our paycheck to be correct, don't we?) Now they are into testing the larger payroll of all those members. It is quite different in that normal employees get paid either a salary or for the hours worked that are reported on a time clock. The members are paid according to the amount of support they raise. As you may recall, our salary consists of the funds you and our supporting churches contribute to Wycliffe on our behalf with a deduction of 10% to cover the overhead of Wycliffe. That means that our amount of pay varies every month. Then they deduct all the overhead expenses like health insurance and worker's compensation. That results in a gross pay from which taxes and the full 15.3% Social Security tax is deducted. After other miscellaneous deductions, it can finally calculate a pay amount. After that we either distribute pay through direct deposit, transfer to an internal banking system for the field locations, or maybe print an actual check. As you can see, it all gets pretty complicated. Praise God for the success of the employee payroll and pray that the team can get the member payroll working soon. Our annual payroll is now over $100 million annually.

Jerry has been asking for several months for prayer for one of her staff members (Linda McMillan, age 54, who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer). Linda decided not to prolong her life by going through chemotherapy. She was happy to go and be with the Lord and chemotherapy promised only a prolonging of life and not a cure in her case. Linda died on February 19th and a memorial service was held at Wycliffe the following Friday. Praise God for a life lived by faith and for the witness she was in facing death as a time of promotion to eternal life with God.

We tried to tell the story on our web site of the Kom dedication and the initiation of the Mbembe language project in Cameroon. We hope you checked out the links that we sent you previously:
Kom: KomDed1
Mbembe: MbembeP1
There are several pages of photos from the events and even some audio of the singing of the choirs. Let us know what you think.

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