I’m guessing from what @SteveC wrote that Purism did send me the phone early, although I have heard from someone who got the L5USA a full month before me, so I’m not sure.
I wrote an email to Purism in late June saying that a friend of mine would be traveling from the US to Bolivia on July 26 and had offered to bring me the phone. (I don’t dare send the phone through Bolivian customs where it can take months of bureaucratic wrangling and things are liable to mysteriously disappear). I asked when Purism would ship the phone, because I wanted to send the phone with my friend. Purism responded saying that it was unlikely that the phone would ship by July 26 and that was the last that I heard until I got an email on July 20 saying that the phone had been shipped. It turned out that my friend had changed her travel plans, and won’t be traveling until October, so there was no advantage in getting the phone earlier.
It is possible that Purism was trying to accommodate my weird shipping situation (and avoid the high cost of shipping to Bolivia), but another possibility is that Purism needs some testers for the first L5USAs, because it has board production issues or software issues that need to be debugged, and it knows that I signed up to get the first dev batches of the L5, so I don’t mind being a tester, whereas @SteveC rejected Dogwood, so he clearly doesn’t want to be a tester.
A third possibility is that Purism wants good documentation/reviews and it knows that I have written documentation (1,2,3,4,5) and blog articles (1,2,3,4,5,6,7) about the Librem 5, so Purism figures that I will add more info on the community wiki and write up a detailed review of the phone (when I get my hands on it). If this is the reason, then I appreciate the gesture on Purism’s part, because it is hard to blog about the phone without having the hardware.