We are thrilled to tell you that after 11 months of waiting to return to Brazil, we finally can! After the missions conference ended at the church here, I once again looked at the Brazilian Government's website with a giant question mark as to when we would be able to return. I began writing an email to the ministry of health to see if we might be able to qualify for an exception even though I was told no at a previous time. What's the worst that could happen? Well, after getting about halfway done with the email, there was a medical word I was unsure how to translate, so I began searching the mandate section on their site and noticed the clauses were different! They had changed the mandate! After seeing that, I could not sleep most of the night, and I almost wrote an update letter right then! I have waited until now to write to make sure nothing changed, especially with the election that was in progress.
Now that we have our proper visas and can head back, our next steps are:
1. Start the process to get permanent residency (which I have heard can take up to three years).
2. Ship our container.
We went to Georgia earlier this month to go through and finalize everything. After going through a good portion of the items and cross-checking our packing list, we staged everything in the warehouse for loading into the container in the next couple of months. I want to thank again, Directline Ministries and Tom Green for their patience and help in this process. They have been a tremendous blessing in housing all of our belongings for the past two years! They have a great operation of which I would encourage you to be familiar. They have it set up to ship from Georgia to a southern port in Brasil. We are currently working out the details and what it will look like to secure its transportation to our state once it arrives. Along with our "house" we have some critical items for the property and church we are bringing over. One of those items is the camp pool liners. The boys swimming pool liner has wholly deteriorated and rendered the pool useless. There is also a sound system (mics, amps, speakers, mixing board, etc.) and piano.
We ask for your prayers specifically over the following areas: That our PCR tests would be negative so we can fly out Thursday, safety in arrival, the remaining details of the container to be worked out with the costs to be kept down, and the residency process to go well.
Thank you for being in our corner these past months and holding us up in prayer!
|
|
