God’s Call Upon Our Lives
In July 2008, we received an official invitation to return to Papua New Guinea via an email from the SIL Director of Personnel in Papua New Guinea. I’d forgotten how tedious the process was for visa application. It involves a three-way communication between the applicant (us), the sponsoring organization (SIL) and the PNG government. We needed to get everything submitted before December because the PNG government offices are often short-staffed during Christmas holidays (December/January).
Kevin was heavily involved in linguistic studies so I started immediately to prepare the required information. Unlike our first applications to the field, nothing was sent to Papua New Guinea by snail mail. Things like health questionnaires, resumes and transcripts with full work and educational experiences, and even copies of our previous visas to Papua New Guinea could be scanned and sent by email. Nevertheless, even with e-mail we seem to run into one kink after the other. By September the first clerk handling our visas changed jobs and a second clerk assumed her role. Most e-mails went through just fine but then one or two must have gotten lost in cyber space. We missed the earlier e-mail that advised us of a problem. Here we were thinking we had sent everything.
In October we received a message advising that the work permits were approved, and the next thing was to get sponsorship letters approved from the PNG government. To our surprise just before Thanksgiving we got an e-mail urgently requesting a long awaited copy of Kevin’s old visa to PNG. What? I thought they had copies of both our last visas with departure dates from PNG. We sent the required information and in the meantime the clerk handling our file went on Christmas vacation and so did we!
By January 7th we called the SIL Visa Coordinator (in the USA) to get a status report. Kevin’s visa had been approved by the PNG Embassy and mine had not! Go figure. We are reminded that ours is a work of faith—even when it comes to receiving our visas. God is able to grant us favor and we trust that we both will have our new visas when we need them. At the writing of this letter we are days from our departure date and I do not have an approved visa, yet.
By January 23, the visas were process and were sent by FedEx to L.A. Once we had our passports in hand we rebooked the tickets and were ready to go at long last.
As I am posting these pages were are at the airport in Japan waiting for our connecting flight. We are just hours away from arriving in PNG. Praise the Lord!!!
Created on January 28, 2009..................................