A Comedy of Errors (and a 5-Star Prayer Request)

 -->

So last night (Wednesday) was just one of those nights…  when things seem to all go wrong at once, and by the end, it gets to the point where you just have to laugh.  After a long day at school, Hillary’s day is enhanced with some automobile trouble, in which she has the privilege of pushing the truck.  For those of you who know her, just take a moment and picture in your mind: Hillary - and - a truck.  Now make her push it.

…

In reality, she did have a little help, but I hope I made my point.  So she’s tired, I’ve had a busy day, and we’re finishing up with supper.  We have a lot on our minds- our visa renewal had been rejected, which meant, if we didn’t get it sorted out soon, we had to be out of the country on Saturday.  More on this later.

Spreading her many textbooks and notebooks out on our dining room table, Hillary rolls up her sleeves and gets to work preparing for another day at Rapale International School.  She needs some brownies as a reward for the students in a Biology-Jeopardy game, so I set to work whipping up some cake-brownie batter.  All was going well, until somehow I managed to slosh a quarter-cup of milk down the front of my pants.  Nicely done, Mark.  Oh well.

So the batter’s ready to go, and I prepare myself for a battle with the oven.  Our oven, since we have been here, has had two minor malfunctions which have made it temperamental, but still serviceable.  The dial to adjust oven temperature now pops off the face of the oven whenever it fancies while you are turning it, so you have to get it in just the right spot to keep it on (which also keeps the gas going.  Otherwise the oven shuts off.)  The “right spot” is never the same thing twice, either, so it’s complete guesswork.  Also, the ignite button has resigned its duties, so we now must use a match or lighter to manually light it the old-fashioned way.  Life is so hard sometimes.

Anyway, so I get in position to light the oven with one hand and wrestle and/or catch the spring-loaded oven dial with the other, and I turn the dial.  No gas.  Interesting.  I know that our tank has plenty of gas, and our stove’s getting gas, but now the dial and the ignition button have succeeded in rallying the rest of the inner workings of the oven to join their coup, and I have no working oven.  Great.

No matter though, I can call one of the other missionaries and bring my brownie batter over to their oven.  I dial my colleague Edgar’s number, and… random beeps that I don’t know how to interpret.  I try his wife, and… nothing.  I know I’ve been having some issues with my phone, so I try Hillary’s.   “Network support failed”.  Hmm.  So our phones aren’t working, that’s not the end of the world (and not the first time its happened here).

At least I can text, so I text Edgar, and he graciously lets us use his oven.  After our brownies are happily baking away, I head back to our house for a couple minutes to make a dent in the mountain of dishes we have piled by the sink.  As I enter the house, Hillary informs me that our internet, which she was using for school work, has stopped working again.   Sigh.  I stride purposefully over to start the dishes, and discover that we no longer have water.

It was at this point that the whole situation just started to seem funny.  In the end, we got to sample some brownies, and later on we even got our water and the internet back.  All was well.  We are learning much about how privileged we are to have these things, and how we often take them for granted.

Now for the visas.

Ready your prayer mats and grab some coffee- our attempts to renew our visas have so far been unfruitful.  And all of our navigating the mazes of government offices haven’t turned up anything either.  To make a long story short, apparently a law was changed just two weeks ago that has rendered us incapable of staying the full six weeks that we were planning on.  So, this afternoon, I was actually headed to the airport with our missionary friends to see if we could last minute change our flights and hop on a flight out of Mozambique tomorrow.  Tomorrow being Friday.  Well, it turns out that’s impossible, and the next available flight would be Monday, which means we’d be shelling out some major American dollars in fees for overstaying our visas, not to mention the changes in flight plans. 

Our only other option is a 12 hour drive to the Malawi border to see if we could gain a visa on re-entry.  However, this option is not feasible, as it seems people around here aren’t fond of those roads- it tends to destroy vehicles.  And nobody is hopping on over to Malawi, at least that we know of.

But hold on to your hats, folks! The director of SIL is going to try one last time to get us  some renewed visas- we think we might have just the right documentation to make a good case with the Immigration higher-ups.  We’ll be making the attempt tomorrow morning, and, God-willing, we might just do it!

So we need your prayers tonight for us and our visas!  Again, we thank you so much for the support you’ve given us thus far in our adventure- God has certainly been good to us.  We’ll hopefully have an update soon!

Mark