The training preview weekend that Leah and I had a while back was a great success! We had four young women participate, and it was amazing to watch what the Lord taught them in such a short time. Ester, Fabiola, Ximena, and Soledad (left to right, pictured below) all learned the creation story in Spanish, and all four expressed interest in participating in the full training that will begin at the end of this month!
Additionally, we recently made our last trip to Ayuma until the beginning of next year, and it was wonderful! Nelly (pictured here with her son Oscar) learned four new stories in just two days and was hungry enough to continually ask us to teach her more stories. She has now, in total, learned eight stories of the life of Christ, and we are hopeful that she will begin sharing them with those in her community.
Prayer Necessities:
1. Please pray that God will call out exactly the women that he wants to participate in our upcoming missionary training. This involves seven weeks of living in primitive conditions, going on short trips to Quechua communities, memorizing great portions of Scripture, and learning a lot of material. The timing requires the participants to miss spending Christmas and New Year's with their families, so there is a lot of sacrifice involved. Pray that the Lord will remind the women He has called that "anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me" (Matt. 10:37-38).
2. Be in prayer for Nelly. She has had some health problems recently, so pray that the Lord would be glorified in that situation, whether that is for her healing or otherwise. Please pray that God's Word would burn in her heart like a fire that cannot be quenched and that she would only have relief if she shares those words with others.
3. Please pray for Misty (pictured here with me as we were waiting at the airport for her flight), who has recently returned to the United States after the faithful completion of her two-year term of missionary service here in Bolivia. Transition back to the American culture can often be more difficult than coming to the country of service originally, so please pray that she would remain close to the Lord during this time and that she would be faithful to obey.
Inquiring Minds Wanna Know:
Please go back and skim through parts I-IV of our visa process if you can't remember what's happened up to this point.
After leaving Cochabamba, we arrived back in Sucre late on a Thursday night with hopes of leaving on the following Sunday evening on a bus bound for Lima, Peru, to attend our team meeting. Since we had not been able to obtain our visas in Cochabamba and were having to essentially begin again in Sucre, we didn't entertain much hope of getting the visa itself and were really just hoping to come out with a letter that would allow us to leave the country without penalty. There was a part of me that was hoping the Lord would come through and give us our visas... but it was a very small part that was continually being crushed into submission and told that it was an idiot by my larger, more rational side.
Our visa runner from Cochabamba had very kindly offered to come to Sucre to help us begin the process there. So, first thing Friday morning, we met her at the immigration office. She had already been there for an hour or so and told us that she had explained our situation to the immigration official, so we quietly followed her into his office to listen to the requirements we would need to complete in order to receive our letters.
What we heard next had my head swimming and my heart pounding in disbelief. The official told us that, if we could get him all of the paperwork necessary by the time his office closed at 6:30 that afternoon, we would have the visas within 72 hours.
I blinked at looked around at the others in the room with me just to see if I had misheard or misunderstood the Spanish. But the stunned looks on the faces of my colleagues told me I had understood correctly and that the man had just said we should have our visas by Tuesday!
We solemnly agreed to the plan and left the office quickly. Once out on the street, we nearly jumped for joy but were quickly brought down to earth by our visa runner, who explained that we were about to understand why she was called a "runner," because that's exactly what we would be doing for the next eight hours or so.
And run we did. Our first stop was the hospital to obtain a medical certification that claimed we were healthy. The doctor at the hospital assured us that all we needed for that was a negative HIV test, so our next stop was a clinic to get this done. Once there, our visa runner had to convince the doctor that we did not need the version of the test that required three days for results. We already had negative results from that test in Cochabamba but, absurdly, each city's doctors usually require their own laboratories to perform the testing. However, after much begging and explaining of our situation, the doctor reluctantly agreed to perform the less accurate one-day version.
The next step was to go to the police station to get a background check done and to ask them to come to our house to verify that we lived there. By the time we went to a local bank to deposit money into the account to pay for those things, it was almost lunchtime. So what, you say? Oh, if you only knew...
If you've ever lived in a Latin American country (or Spain), you know that things shut down from about noon to 2:30. Bolivia is no exception to that, but we knew we couldn't sit on our hands for 2-1/2 hours while they ate lunch and napped. But, thankfully, the police were receptive to being paid overtime for coming to our house during their lunch hour.
So I drove them to our house while Leah and the girls went to get our witnesses. That's right, witnesses. We had to have two Bolivian citizens who knew us and would vouch for us that we lived where we said we did. The receipts for our bills were not enough; we had to have our friends say that they knew we lived there. We are blessed to have wonderful brothers in Christ who were willing to come to our house during their own lunch hours in order to help us out.
During that time with the police at our house, anything that could go wrong did. Earlier that morning, we had locked ourselves out of the house and had to break a window to get back in. What do you think THAT looked like to the cops? :) And the police officers asked for multiple copies of every document we had, causing our printer/copier to run out of ink, forcing us to go down the street to our friend Trent's house to make copies. Then, Trent's copier ran out of ink, forcing him to have to speed into town to buy more. But, finally, after two hours, it was all done, and the police agreed that we lived where we said we did!
We drove the cops back to the police station and set off to find a lawyer to draft an official letter requesting permanent residency in Bolivia. After obtaining that letter, we separated into three groups. The visa runner ran off to find a notary to notarize various documents, Leah went to the clinic to get our HIV test results, and I went back to the police station to pick up the official documents for the background check and verification of legal domicile.
After all of that, we all met up at the notary's office to sign a variety of documents, then flew back across town to the immigration office. The last customers of the day, we were led into the official's office... at 6:24!
He glanced over the documents while we held our breath and, after several minutes, he looked up and told us we were lacking the medical certification we needed. We were crestfallen. The doctor in the morning had told us the HIV test results were all we needed but, evidently, there was an official document that certified more than that. The official then proceeded to tell us that, if we would bring him the medical certification first thing on Monday morning, we would still have our visas by Tuesday afternoon. Wow!
We walked out of the office that day rejoicing! We still had two more things to do - the medical certification and the payment of some fines - but we would have the visa on Tuesday!
On Saturday, we stood in line at the bank for two hours to pay the fines. On Monday, we got the medical certification and then took it to the immigration official, who told us to return at 5:00 the following day to pick up our passports and visas.
That Tuesday afternoon, just as he promised, the official handed us our passports, complete with shiny new Bolivian residency visas inside! A few hours later, we boarded a bus bound for Peru and, a couple of weeks later, I boarded a plane that would take me on my first visit to the United States in eighteen months. It was fantastic!
We had spent eight months waiting for a visa in Cochabamba, and my faith had been sorely tested and been found lacking. But my God is faithful. After months of waiting, He granted our visas in just three days!
"In the LORD's hand the king's heart is a stream of water that he channels toward all who please him" (Prov. 21:1).
