I just want to share the story about how Helen and I got our residency in Bolivia.

On the 18th of February we turned our passports in with our paperwork. Helen was applying for 2 year residency and I was applying for permanent residency.

On the 28th of February Ximena turned in the request to borrow our passports back from immigration because we needed them to travel. However, immigration kept telling them to come back later. Then on the Friday before we travelled Ximena asked us to go to immigration to ask for the passports. She thought that they would listen if we went with our booking confirmation for our flights out of Lima.

We went to immigration Friday morning and after waiting in lines we were told that they had sent our passports to immigration in La Paz the day before on the 7th of March even though they knew that we wanted to borrow our passports.

So that Friday we got a power of attorney made for Janet in La Paz so that she could ask to borrow our passports back in La Paz. We went to DHL to send the power of attorney and other documents to La Paz. However, the man there told us that they would not arrive in La Paz till Tuesday because DHL does not work on Saturday or Sunday. We planned to leave for La Paz Wednesday morning. The man told us that if we wanted the papers to arrive sooner we could go to UPS because they work on Saturday and Sunday. We decided to send the papers with DHL so that nobody would be working on the Sabbath carrying our papers, and prayed that God would speed up the shipping of our papers. This was at about 3pm Friday afternoon. DHL delivered our papers to Janet Monday morning.

We arrived in La Paz Thursday morning on the bus and went to immigration with Janet. We waited there for a about an hour and a half after handing in the final papers to borrow our passports. The man who we had given the papers to came back and told us that they did not want to loan our passports back to us. They wanted to give us our passports back with our residencies finished and he asked us to wait while they finished our residencies. They gave us

our passports with our residencies finished after only three weeks and three days after we applied in Santa Cruz. For those of you who have not experienced Bolivian immigration, it normally takes six to nine months to finish the permanent residency.

Praise the Lord,

Steve