Lots of Lines

This week we did a lot of waiting in lines and none of it unfortunately had to do with mission work.

On Friday we went to an office to continue our visa papers. We waited in line to pay a fee, waited in line to have our papers evaluated, got scolded for trying to help Braeden with his spanish at the desk next to me. We were then asked to draw a picture of where we were living. By now Braeden was a little frustrated with the difficult lady he was working with. But my dad fixed it by asking if they needed a fingerprint of his nose when she brought the ink over for fingerprints. She apparently thought that was funny because everyone went smoothly from there.

Wednesday we spent two hours working on finishing our visas for the year. We stood line to get in to the immigration office, stood in line to sit down at desk number three to be told we need to go upstairs to a private office. We held our breaths, hoping that he wouldn't notice that my last name on my passport(Timmer) was not the same as my last name on my bank statement(Ellis), made it through, stood in line to be handed a blank bill, stood in the next line so the bill could be filled out, stood in the next one to hand the bill over, waited in a waiting room to be called to pay the bill, went back to the waiting room to wait to be called to hand everything over and show that we had paid the bill. We were a little nervous when our passports were slipped into a manilla folder and piled on a shaky stack of folders but by then we were allowed to leave so we didn't care. i was rewarded by lunch at Burger King, which some people would say doesn't taste the same as the states but to my pregnant stomach, it was just fine.

For those of you who think traffic in downtown Holland at Tulip Time is bad, you've never taken a taxi into the middle of the cancha at lunchtime. The cancha is a huge market in Bolivia that sells everything from tires and shoelaces to Barbies and raw meat. Convenient to shop in, inconvenient to get to. we spent twenty minutes in a line of cars crammed onto a one lane street in the market, on our way to our doctor's appointment whose office sits in the center of the market. The line was worth it though, i got a massage and a promise of an ultrasound in a week to tell us what the baby is.

On a positive note, Braeden and i did the message at our church's youth group last night. We used the parable of the donuts. if anyone is interested in the story go to http://www.skywriting.net/inspirational/stories/the_parable_of_the_push-ups.html

Tonight is going to be a busy night with Emily's birthday party and baby washing, which we need to be getting ready for right now.

Love, Braeden and Tiffany