Our Time in the Nation's Capital

We needed to travel to Washington DC in order to continue working on our visas, so we scheduled a trip for a few days prior to when we needed to arrive at the International Learning Center for our time of orientation. Quite honestly, after months of gathering documents and taking them through the authentications process, we were anticipating a very difficult experience. However, God honored the prayers of many of you, and He provided many delightful people along the way to make the process smooth. Things were going so well, in fact, that we actually called one of the missionaries in Brazil from the Brazilian consulate because we were concerned that we were doing something wrong:)

Our visa application was accepted on our very first visit to the consulate, which is so rare that all we can say is "praise the Father for answered prayers." Please join us now as we are praying daily that we will have our visas in hand by the time orientation will be over in June. Let me quickly acknowledge those neat folks God sent our way. First, we had driven literally through the night to arrive at the US State Department upon opening. However, we stopped by our hotel and were immediately blessed by the gracious assistance of Nadine. Over the course of the next several days, I learned that she had actually discovered a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through the ministry of a missionary to here homeland in Africa. What an encouragement!

It was necessary to make visits to the authentications office of the US State Department on consecutive days. We had mailed over 100 pages of documents ahead hoping that they would be ready before our arrival. Unfortunately, they had not even been started, but Sonja went the extra mile and had all of our docs ready by the next day!

As we arrived at the Brazilian Consulate, we were not sure what to expect, but the people were wonderfully gracious, friendly and helpful. The girls were so excited to meet several Brazilians!

The process was so much smoother than expected that we had extra time for sightseeing. We had scheduled a Capital and White House tour through the office of our Congressman, Brett Guthrie, but how surprised we were when Congressman Guthrie was the one who gave us the Capital tour himself! We got to see all kinds of really cool things off the normal tour, and he even took Hannah and Haley onto the floor of the House of Representatives!

We got to see many of the monuments and spent some time in the Smithsonian. A surprise treat of the trip was the opportunity to reconnect with a really good friend from college, Jason Pack. Jason works in the FBI press office, so we got another personal tour. The girls got to watch as agents were certified on the firing range. Pretty cool!