I’m not posting from Brazil. Instead, I’m posting from Dulles International Airport.

Things have gone remarkably smoothly for us thus far, for which we’re both thankful. We’re both a little stiff and sore, too, something that’s not going to get any better with the 10 or so hour flight we have coming up in about an hour and a half. But that’s nothing to cry about, and we’re generally feeling pretty good.

Thanks for all your prayers, and please keep praying that the next portion of our journey goes as smoothly as the first. I hope everyone has a safe and spectacular New Year’s Eve.

Bright and early at 7:45 AM, our plane leaves for Dulles International Airport. From there, we fly straight to Rio, and should land at 10:25 AM Rio time on January 1.

It’s been pretty stressful getting everything packed up and ready to go (again), and I’m not really, truly going to believe it’s happening until they actually let us on the plane. Or maybe when we actually get through customs. We’ll see.

But, should everything go smoothly, our next post will be from sunny Rio de Janiero, where it is currently 79 degrees and fair. Man, that sounds pretty good about now.

After seven long months, five of them of very frustrated waiting, we are now legal to live in Brazil for the next two years.

Thanks for everyone’s prayer and support. Now all we have to do is actually go there. We leave the morning of the 31st, and will land in Rio in the first morning of the New Year.

Or so we’re told. Our visas are purportedly in the mail from San Francisco, and should arrive tommorow or Monday. Please be praying that the last step in this ridiculously long process goes smoother than all the others have so far!

So it turns out that mailing the stuff down to the consulate doesn’t work, despite the fact that that is exactly what we were told to do. It turns out that, not only does the visa department there not take applications by mail (which we knew), they don’t accept anything by mail. Nothing. It doesn’t matter what you mail. You could mail an adorable puppy, a check for a million dollars signed by Bill Gates, a deed to Arizona, anything, and they would send it back to you with a form letter informing you that they do not accept visa applications by mail. You must use an Authorized Visa Agent(tm) to send the visa department any puppies.

So, after a messy and frustrating week that involved a very disappointing trip to the post office, recalling an express mail envelope (did you know you could do that? Neither did anyone at the post office, which made things a little more awkward when it turned out I knew more about that aspect of their jobs than they did) and a few other less interesting things.

Anyway, it’s off to an Authorized Visa Agent(tm) now, and we should have our visas in hand by the end of the week. Of course, they should accept documents (and puppies) by mail, and we should have had our visas in hand last week, but in the end it won’t matter too much. We’re hoping to fly out on New Year’s Eve.

Our passports, that is, are off to the Brazilian consulate. We just got back from the post office, where we expressed our passports (an an extraordinary amount of money) down to Brazil. Please, please be praying that everything goes smoothly in San Francisco and that the visas come in next week.

The last time we spoke to the consulate (face to face, waaaay back in August), we were told that, once authorization comes through, we could just pop in with our money & passports, and leave with the visas. Of course, we can’t just pop down to SF like that, but we were assured that mail would work just as well. All that to say, based on everything I’ve head, there shouldn’t be any problems–but we can use all the prayers we can get that that is, in fact, the case.

As Lorraine noted in her last post, we’ve been looking at going somewhere other than Rio, particularly, Lima, Peru. Today, we had a very good talk with the principal of ICS-Lima. There would be a few things to work through, but it sounded like that would work pretty well.

Almost exactly two hours later, we got a phone call from the Brazilian Consulate in San Francisco, informing us that our visas have been authorized.

So, unless something very strange happens at the consulate (and one thing I have learned from this experience is not to count my chickens until they are not only hatched, but grown, beheaded, plucked, deep fried in batter and served to me in a bucket), we should be in Rio before Christmas.

And that would be a very, very good Christmas present.

After months of waiting, we have received approval from Rio to seek other assignments within the NICS system. There is still a chance we could go to Rio, if our visas come through before December 13, but after that we will stop waiting and go with another school. Right now, it looks like that school could be Lima, Peru.

Lima has several things going for it. Peruvians speak Spanish, which Tim took 5 years of. Peru is in South America, still, which was our target continent. They really need us–they’ve been trying to fill our positions all year. There are two jobs, which are not necessarily our areas of expertise, but which we can fill adequately. Tim would be the librarian and I would be the GED tutor for the high school.

One thing which may prevent us from going to Lima is that the school requires teachers to raise a certain amount of monthly support, which Tim and I don’t have. As you’ve read from us in the past, we are committed to helping missionaries, and that includes not putting more strain on our churches’ mission budgets. Please pray with us that we can surmount this small financial obstacle, so that we may serve God in Lima.