paperwork

Tests!

Dear friends!

Finally, warmer weather is here. I hope you are as glad about it as my family and I are. It was a long cold winter.

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Much has happened, so here is a brief synopsis: We have narrowed down our initial location in France to be… Caen, in Normandy. We will be studying French at the university there, and the kids will be attending local school. We are in the stage of needing to pay tuition, after which the university can send us papers which we use to then apply for a long-term French visa. We are excited, and nervous.

Please pray as we try to find an apartment or house online. We may need to go through a housing agency to do this. We are hoping to find something near both the university and the school Liberty and Van will attend.

More to come!

the ball is rolling

As you know, we heard from the school who invited us to still come teach. We enjoyed a flurry of email from them, including one which had an Excel file with my teaching schedule. Since then the email levels have dropped back to 0. That is fine. What is important is that they actually sent the LOI to the visa company in Vancouver. The agent in turn confirmed that the LOI they received was actually correct! So on that side things are looking good. We refrained from sending our precious passports, photos, application forms, and other documents (like birth and marriage certificates) until we could receive confirmation about the above two “actually’s”. So we sent out our share of documents this week and they are due in Vancouver, to the same company, by Thursday. We paid extra for Express processing, so we figure we will get our passports with the China visas around April 4.

Until we get word that the applications were successfully submitted, we are holding off buying tickets, or cancelling our 6-month apartment rental contract. Once we know the visas have been issued and are on their way back to Chiang Mai, we will then prepare to leave.

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Thank you for praying!

van and the ping river

December news

Dear friends, what a season this has been. It has been a challenge to stay focused in faith and not lose heart, but we press on.

We have received various bits of news of the school we have been trying to get to. Way back in early December we received an email from the Dept Director bemoaning the hassle of getting the one last Invitation Letter, along with this thoughts that they school might just give up. We gave that a few days thought, consulted with another worker, and responded with essentially a deadline: Either the Invitation Letter comes soon or we look elsewhere. That got the Dept Director energetically writing to ask us not to…. but not a word from the Foreign Official.

In the meantime we have heard that a number of other expats at the school on student visas were all told they had to leave by January 4th. OK, so the gov is clearing the school of foreigners. This has happened before and we are glad we aren’t there to get caught up in that clearing. Then recently we heard the other English teacher, an American, was still there. His description of what he has been doing was very enlightening. It turns out that right in Sept the school asked him to take the classes I was going to take. So he said yes; he is young and inexperienced in China teaching, and did not realize what was happening. Basically, once he said yes, with good intentions and just trying to help the students, and was teaching ALL the classes, it gave the school little reason to hire another one. One for the price of two! We don’t hold any grudges, and it is good to see what sort of administration we could have been working under.

All this to say is we are looking into other options and will post an update soon. We hope your Christmas was a good time, and that the New Year preparations are going well too!

The dance continues

On Thursday on November 26 (American Thanksgiving Day), with happy hearts, Van, Liberty, Michelle and I headed to Toronto to apply for our visas. We had all the original documents we needed, or so we thought. (Cue sad music)

Once there the front desk clerk told us that there is still one missing piece of paper, a Letter of Invitation (LOI) from a new government office. We managed to get up to a visa clerk’s desk and get some answers to questions we did ask, and some we did not even know to ask.

The first interesting tidbit is that the missing LOI should have been issued with the all-important Work Permit. Praise God, we do have the Work Permit (which tells us Shane is approved by the highest levels of government). But, the cleck emphasized that there is no way to have a Work Permit without the corresponding LOI. Where then is this LOI? The clerk figures that the school officials simply forgot to include this LOI when they mailed us the other originals.

Why would they forget this? Turns out it is a new requirement. So new in fact that another Canadian friend of ours have a similar delay in Sept for several weeks, and she is even connected to the best state school in the province. If they did not know, then the small school in the small town we are headed too can be forgiven for not knowing either. (*note: another friend also just wrote us to say they too had an issue with the same LOI with their school.)

Additionally, the official at the school we are going to is new (3 years); the school has not hired a Canadian in over 5 years; and there have been several rule changes the past few years anyway.

All this to say, it is now a matter of the school finding that missing LOI and posting it to us. Whether they use the slow method like last time (3 weeks!) or a faster method remains to be seen. We have asked them, of course, to use a faster method.

Please pray then that they find the LOI and post it to us soon. We hope they haven’t lost it which would mean more time is needed to get the Work Permit and corresponding LOI re-issued. Plus, we are quickly coming to a point in time where the schools will start to shut down for the holidays in January, so we need to be there in December. We need to be there in December because registering with the police can take a couple weeks, and we need to have that finished within 4 weeks of our arrival in the country.

Thank you for your prayers! Thank you for standing with us, and believing God has great things in store for the city to which we are headed.

UPDATE: We did hear from a school official whose title is Waiban (pronounced Why-Bahn) and she told us they are working on it. Her choice of words makes us wonder… the LOI should be there, it was issued with the Work Permit, so what are they “working on”?

Papers

Just a few days ago the app we have been using to track our paperwork from China to here lit up with a notification! Eagerly we opened it up to see the update…. the paperwork is now in Canada. Closer than ever.

Ok, so the papers are not in our hands yet, and we still worry that the officials left out one or two important documents, BUT, when the app’s last update was 5 days old we wondered if the papers had been lost in transit. So this new update showing us they are in Canada is a huge relief.

They must have taken a boat.

Cookes Overseas