While our family was boarding a British Airways flight from Chicago to London on our way to Malawi, a band of ten thieves were jumping the wall of Kindle Orphan Outreach’s Central Office, beating and tying up the two guards, and starting to smash their way through our burglar bars. It took them four hours to finally break in and rip the door off of the built-in safe, but they finally made off with about $280 in cash and 60 gallons of diesel. We are thankful that they didn’t take Kindle’s laptop or any of the medicines that were stored there, and that the guards’ injuries were not life-threatening.

The next day, I was forbidden from carrying a printer onto the plane for the last leg of our journey to Malawi. I explained to the gate check people that the printer was fragile, so I really did need to carry it on. They assured me that they would take good care of it, don’t worry. When we arrived in Lilongwe, the printer was sitting on the baggage carousel with all of the checked baggage, and was never going to print again. $150 wasted on a printer and 8 ink cartridges, and one carry-on’s worth of stuff that we could have taken in its place.

The next day, while doing Windows Updates on a new Kindle laptop that was repaired under warranty in the USA, it crashed. Dead motherboard (again!), but this time it’s no longer under warranty. $550 worth of computer bought by Kindle that provided maybe four days of useful service before turning into an ungainly paperweight. And another 8 pounds’ worth of precious baggage allowance wasted.

But wait, there’s more! The NEXT day, I made a classic rookie mistake: We had bought a used Wii console and several games in the USA, and I plugged it in without a transformer–dead Wii. That’s a Wii system and games, now all useless weight.

But money, diesel, printers, computers, and game systems really aren’t what life is supposed to be all about. We had some recent visitors to Kindle from a potential partner organization, and spending a morning with them was a wonderful way to remember what we’re doing in Malawi. It’s staggering to realize how many thousands of people are directly impacted by our work. That’s what it’s all about.