End of November Update
Greetings everyone! I hope everyone is doing well! I just wanted to provide an update as it’s been a while. It’s been crazy busy and I should be working on something else, but I’m taking a break.
If anyone of you have been wondering how come we haven’t come back home to visit these last couple of years, the picture above is a good summary of why. Unfortunately, China has a very different approach to the “pandemic”, I’m sure you guys are familiar with it, “zero covid”. In short, it restricts people from leaving and coming back to China. We thought that moving to Macau would be a little more like HK in terms of them opening back up to the international community, but they aren’t. It’s been extremely expensive purchasing tickets to visit and we’ve been worried about having a similar situation as the last time we left to visit the USA. That being said, they have now lessened the time needed to quarantine coming back to Mainland China and Macau is adopting this policy themselves. Macau has also mentioned that “blue card” holders will be guaranteed entry back into Macau. So that is some major cause of celebration, the only problem is that flying out of Macau or Mainland is still around $2-3000 USD a ticket. Times that by three and half of a adult ticket cost for Daniel, it’s still crazy expensive to fly at the moment. Please help us pray for these concerns to be addressed and the tickets will decrease in price.
The family is doing good! We have some terrific news, we figured out a way to get back together sooner and God has allowed us to figure out a way to get Elizabeth, Noah and Daniel’s visa paperwork finished much sooner than expected! As of this month, Noah was able to officially start school (K2- basically kindergarten) at Macau Anglican College with me and he absolutely loves it! Daniel is officially 5 months as of this month going on 6 months! It’s hard to keep track of the time…
In terms of Elizabeth though, she will need to leave Macau temporarily with the boys so she can change her VISA over to my VISA arrangement. We never would have imagined Macau would have been so difficult to bring family after receiving a work visa (more on that process in another post). So if you could also help us pray that everything will get situated quickly, though we’ve been assured it’ll be much quicker on the Mainland side of bureaucracy.
Overall, we love Macau despite some of these difficult situations. Once we get Elizabeth situated, there shouldn’t be any other problems. We have found a church that we have been attending and feel like we’ve begun to find a community of friends and believers in Christ here. We would like to also find another church, preferably for a Bible study on another day besides Sunday, where we could directly participate more with the locals here. I’d love for my Cantonese to get better, while learning more about the Word of God and how to evangelize in Cantonese. We also want Noah to continue in his Cantonese language acquisition. His Mandarin is now on par with his English, but we feel that as a “Guangdong ren”, he should learn both.
Anyway, I think that about wraps it up here at this time. I’ll continue to keep you guys posted and write another post on the whole process bringing family to Macau and what we are planning to do for Christmas in terms of ministry! God bless you all!
branhow.com 