The New Phonebooks Are Here!

Well, not the phone books exactly, but if you watch Steve Martin's character in the clip above then you can understand how we feel/act when we have our new residency cards in hand.

Once we made it to immigration, today's process was s-m-o-o-t-h!  Just a quick look to verify that the new copy of our document was correct!  They weren't at all busy, so we moved through the "appointment" phase to the pay phase to the picture/thumbprint phase to the walk-out-the--door-with-our-cards-in-hand phase in about an hour.  Excellent!

These cards are good until mid-August (while they more closely review all of our documents.)  We are supposed to call mid-July to see if our paperwork has finished the final review process and if they have printed our permanent (1-year) card for 2014-15.  

All-in-all the smoothest process yet!  This time and one more under this annual renewal process and then at the end of our fifth year, the process changes to a two-year renewal with very little documentation required.  

Thanks for praying with us--prayers answered!

Painless!

Today's stop at the immigration office was completely painless.  We waited less than 30 minutes to be seen, only had to copy one additional document, received initial acceptance of all of our paperwork and were assigned an appointment with another agent tomorrow afternoon.  Between this morning and our appointment time (2:00 p.m) tomorrow, they will review the documents in detail, especially our support letter and the Spanish translation which accompanies it.  Last year they required us to return to the translator so he could make several (illogical) changes.  We're praying that everything is perfect this year!

Amazingly, they didn't even mention that our expiration date is more than 30 days in the future.  Maybe that's no longer an issue for them or maybe (more likely) it is God's answer to our prayers.

Hoping to have only good news this year--thanks for praying for us; it really does make a difference.  I'll update tomorrow afternoon.