And now the Bad News

So Thursday the 22nd we got the offer to buy and they suggested a closing date.

On Friday I wrote our Peace Corps Placement Officer, Lateefah Burgess, to ask if she could shed any light on when we would be leaving.  The buyers were waffling between early September and mid-October, and we wanted to accommodate them as much as we could. On the other hand, we believed that we were set for an October departure date, so we needed to be careful. Received an auto-reply that Lateefah would be out of the office until Wednesday.

OK, so sit tight and work on other things (house inspector came on Tuesday), like packing!

Late Wednesday afternoon, Lateefah called and Steve talked with her.  She said, "I am afraid have bad news for you.  Both of your programs have been cancelled."

Steve was struck silent, and thought, "OK.  She's not gonna make me cry."  Of course, if it had been me, I would not have hesitated to cry.

He said, "Is it for security reasons?" thinking about the early July bombing that took place in Uganda.  The Peace Corps monitors the political/social situations in all its partner countries to insure that the volunteers are safe.  Which is good, dontcha think?

She didn't answer the question.  She just said, "I'm so sorry.  The earliest that we will be able to match you to a program will be a January departure date."

So Steve goes into "sell mode," explaining how flexible we are, that just because we had been assigned to do public health and IT, doesn't prevent us from doing something else.  He mentioned that I would be more than willing to give vaccinations, or teach health issues, etc. Heck, I'll dig ditches as long as I've got some good sunscreen!

So now we're really in limbo.  The house is sold and we need to get out.  Steve's last day at work is August 27.  We need to find some temporary housing (cheap!)  Steve wants to find some kind of volunteer project he can work on between now and when we leave.  I'll keep teaching Zumba and whatever other fitness classes come my way.  I may have a little charity project in the works, but I'll write about that later.

Looking on the bright side, we get to spend the holidays with our family, and maybe even see some Tar Heel Basketball before we leave!

First the Good News

We sold our house!  How fantastic.  And what a load off our minds.

We had decided to throw in the towel and just rent the house.  After showing it SO MANY TIMES (32, I think), we still had not received a single offer.  On Monday, July 19, we met with a guy from a rental management company (Louise Beck Properties) and signed on with them to take care of things while we were gone.  We were very impressed with their services and especially with their knowledge of the market and how things should be done.  He recommended that we keep our house on the market, but we would move forward with marketing it as a rental.  On Wednesday a woman came out to take pictures that would show the place on their website, left ANOTHER lock box.

And on Thursday we received an offer to buy the house!  It was a really low offer, but we took it.  We're just barely breaking even on what we paid back in 2003, but that's better than a lot of people have done.  The house inspector has inspected, and we're waiting for their repair requests.  We're hoping to close in early September, but don't have that nailed down yet.  More on that later.

The people at the rental agency were SO nice and didn't charge us a penny for the work they'd done.