visas

Another delay

Well, this seems familiar. Once more we are facing a delay of our original departure date! We had naively thought we would depart Canada for France in late June. Well, to apply for a long-term visa for France one has to actually fill out an application form online which results in you being assigned a date on which an interview for the visa takes place. The form to fill out is multi-page, and each page would stall for us as there was some detail being asked fo that we didn’t have, or know if it applied to us. We would write to a few places to try to get answers and most time the replies were not that helpful. So back to form online and voila, suddenly we could go to teh next page even htough the missing info wasn’t supplied. So, is it needed? Or no? Will we find out at the interview?

Anyway, at the end of this online application form the final pop up window tells me that there is a 30 day wait between the completion of this form and the actual interview. WHAT?? If this had been the first pop-up or shared bit of info we would have gone through it much more speedily.

As it is, our visa interviews take place July 18. Each of us gets 30 minutes. Even Liberty and Van. There is a lengthy list of things we need to bring, but the details missing from the online form worry me. Please pray about this.

Hamilton Harbour

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we have been able to visit Hamilton harbour, and take lovely bike rides here and there. Each time we stay here as the kids grow older they discover more things about Canada. For example, we have usually had a car when we are home, but not this time. This has meant taking the bus… just like in China! But we’ve never taken the bus here and at first it seemed trickier than China. In China you just sort of barge onto the bus and toss money at the driver. Here, people are in lines, they move slowly onto the bus, and the bus drivers are friendly. Wow, what a change.

Our bus stop

We all miss the lively street activity you can find in China, but here we’ve enjoyed the odd fun thing, like face painting at a restaurant! There was a lady giving free face paintings to any kid who wanted it. Of course our kids did!

Liberty the Leopard

Van, the more traditional leopard

check out the three guys on the truck

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

van and the ping river

LOI and an open door

The Letter of Invitation Came!

We have amazing and surprising news. Remember way back in October/November 2015 when we were trying to get our paperwork to get a visa to go to Ili on a Teacher visa? The paperwork in its entirety did not come, and we stopped hearing from the school official. So, in December 2015, after some time of waiting, we decided to move on and opted to go to Chiang Mai as a first step back to China. We honestly did not expect to hear from that school ever again. We even shared some suggestions as to what was behind their strange behaviour: some underling lost the paperwork; the other foreigners were kicked out in January so maybe higher-ups did not want more foreigners there; the current single English teacher had volunteered to cover my classes, prompting the school to think, “Hey, we have one guy doing two classes worth… why pay for the second teacher? Anyway, the possibilities could be endless.

Out of the blue on Friday, Feb 26, I checked email

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to discover she had emailed me the last, missing, elusive Letter of Invitation. WHAT?!?! We wrote a quick response acknowledging her email and asked her when she hoped to see us. “As soon as possible” was her reply. According to her another office had delayed this Letter for 2 months, and she only just recently acquired it. The document clearly has a date of issue of December 2015, and a school stamp of early January (so why were we being told in late February?) We emailed it to a Canadian visa company who has helped us before with China visas to see if they could confirm that this was indeed the correct Letter. They responded ‘yes, it is’.

So, it seems the door has been opened for us. We need specific prayers.

Timing is everything. These Letter of Invitations indicate in which country the application will apply. Ours reads, ‘Canada’. Except we are not in Canada. Just the other morning I tried to apply for the visas in Chiang Mai, and this Consulate was ready to accept the applications without seeing the originals (printouts suffice), but then they noticed our LOI says, ‘Canada’, so they told us they can not process it here. We then told the school that, just as with the Work Permit, they would need to mail us the original Letter of Invitation to Canada.

The challenge then is getting the school to send the original LOI to the visa company that will help us (because we are not going to fly all the way back!!) in a speedy manner. The last time they sent the original Work Permit it took 3 weeks. The school has said that classes are basically starting now, so we can’t afford 3 weeks. Neither can they really. And this morning we did in fact get an email from the school official telling us they mailed the LOI (but did not provide a tracking number nor confirmation that they sent to the visa company in Vancouver and not to our home address). And though it is out of our hands as to how quickly the school opts to send this last original, the speed at which we can get our visa may affect the school’s willingness to keep this door open. I know, I know, this is beyond our control, and really a situation created in part by the school, and in part by the slow office somewhere in Urumqi. But the way these things go in China, the ball is now in our hands and we have to somehow make it work, and work quickly, even though the previous delays were not our doing.

Please pray this LOI gets to Canada, preferably to the visa company who is waiting for it, soon.

Pray also that our own passports and other documentation will make it to the same visa company safely. We will only send our paperwork when we have a tracking number from the school to confirm that they have indeed sent the LOI, and in fact we are only going to mail our paperwork once the LOI tracking indicates it has left Asia.

Pray that we find some grace with our apartment rental. We signed a 6-month contract, and it stipulated that we lose 2 months rent if we break the contract early. Well, at the time we thought this was entirely unlikely! 

Please pray also as we begin to prepare the kids for the move. They still most definitely want to go back to China, but they have just settled into Chiang Mai, enjoy their routine here, and importantly for Liberty, have made some friends. They don’t relish another good-bye.

on our way... maybe?

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!

IMG_20151220_152901

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”?sad

The saga continues

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._-1322167717_1446130016409_1446130035000_wifi_0

QUICK UPDATE

Your prayers are being heard!

To be more precise, our Invitation Letter is not here yet. But what is new is an email from the official preparing our Letter. Not receiving any communication from the school has left us wondering what is going on. Well, the official wrote Sunday night telling us that there have been rule changes, and that it is more complicated to get the Invitation Letter approved. But, she assured us she is working on it. She even told us our apartment has been ready for us since August. She also said that the invitation Letter would not be ready before October.

This means we need to change our plane tickets, again. We are flying Hainan Air, and they have a straightforward policy for rebooking flights, so we are thankful for that. But the official still has not given us a date for which we can prepare.

Please pray with us for some clarity from the school about when we can expect to leave Canada/arrive in China. We really do not want to pick another date and then find out from the school that we guessed wrong. (As an aside, we bought these tickets a long time ago due to incredibly low prices, as well as with the assumption that surely everything would be ready within 3 months. By rebooking twice now we are actually still paying less than if we had not bought any tickets until now. But if we have to rebook a third time, then it will cost more).

To recap: We were due to leave August 20th, but we had to rebook because the official did not have the Letter ready.

We then were scheduled to leave this Sunday, September 20, having thought that the Letter would be ready within a month, but it is not and we are now delayed again.

We do not know what new date to schedule for our departure! It will not be until October sometime.

Some more details

The other day we heard from a friend who is in China, in our city, and she told us there would be a lengthy school holiday coming up. It starts Sept 23 and goes until Oct 7.

If our papers are not ready by Sept 15 it is unlikely we will leave be leaving before Oct 7 because the school holiday means every office closes too. So please pray

sunset

Waiting for papers

We finally have some concrete news! The person in charge of arranging for our paperwork which we need to use to apply for the visas was on holiday in Kazakstan. We are feeling relieved as we wondered if we were getting a Central Asia “no”: It is cultural to not say “no” directly. Instead, nothing happens and you are supposed to get the hint.

We expect to hear directly from this person in the next week and can them, hopefully, have a clearer idea about the next aimed-for departure date. Thank you for praying with us about this!