It's Official!

After a week of traveling on buses, planes, taxis, etc. to get through the Andes mountains to Lima and on to Arica, Chile, we are now officially card-carrying residents of Peru.  What that exactly means to the average person, I have no idea.  But evidently it is an important step.  I just know that it was a GIANT hassle and it cost us a lot of money to get a rubber stamp in our passport that says we are "residents".  We also have official Peruvian identification cards now (look a lot like a drivers license from the USA) that we have to carry everywhere and be ready to show any one at the drop of a hat.  Now, we start the whole process again for Sarah... since she is a minor, she couldn't apply for residency until her parents were actually residents.  The good news is that the law changed while we were in mid-process and now we won't have to leave the country to get her paperwork processed!  We will have to travel back to Lima, but that is all.  Hallelujah!

So, if you are following our plumbing saga, the news for today is... the plumber still appears to live in our house.  Yes, that's right, he is still here.  If it's not one thing, it's another (old timers can hear Rosanna Rosannadana speaking in their heads right now).  Today, the plumber has emptied our water tank on the roof and cleaned it out and he is going to put some new valves and hootie-doots and doomaflajies on it so that he can connect our pressure pump up.  If you couldn't already guess, I have absolutely no idea what he is doing!  I finally gave up trying to understand... it dawned on me that I didn't understand the plumbers in Texas, so why on earth would I even think that I could understand one in Peru!!!???  It didn't make any sense to me in English, so it certainly doesn't in Spanish!  Anyway, maybe we can take a real, honest to goodness bath/shower sometime this week... maybe.  Guess I better find out when Alfredo's birthday is, just in case he is still living with us when that occurs!  :)

I don't want to write too much "good stuff" because it is almost newsletter time again and I already have plans to fill it up with the "good stuff".  Sorry... you'll have to wait to read about ministry happenings later.  Suffice to say that we are busy and getting busier...