If you have been reading the blog posts you will have been on a rollercoaster with us.

Let me start with the obvious… we still do not have our visas. Despite receiving what we thought were all the documents we needed via email, it was not enough. The new China Visa Centre website stated that printouts of photos of documents would suffice, but in our case they want the originals. We notified the school, and now we wait for 1 or 2 weeks for those to get here. They willed be mailed. Please pray that all the originals we need come at the same time.

But the biggest hurdle has been cleared. That was being cleared for a Work Permit. We needed several other documents, but the big one we were waiting on was the Work Permit. This is the first time we’ve used this term I think, and that is because we too are learning about the process as we go. Without the Work Permit it would not matter what the school or anyone else did, we would not be able to get a visa in China as a teacher. Now that we have been given a Work Permit that means we can. But it carries with it other ramifications!

You may recall that we have at times said that our time looks to be limited in China given how many years we have already been there on student visas, and other types. Well, we have never had Work visas before. And what this new Work Permit does is give us up to TEN more years, at least, of visas in China. We have, at times, thought we had at most 2 or 3 years more. So we will need to prayerfully consider our next options over the next decade. (Of course, the schooling of the children comes into play too, as in 10 years Liberty will be 18! and Van will be 15!) But that is content for another, much later, post.