Visas Renewed!

This is a rather disjointed blog post. You’ve been forewarned. I hope you don’t mind.

We got our visas renewed! Apparently, we were the first people from our school to need their student visas renewed since the American consulate closed. We have no idea what they did, but when we went to the immigration office there were no problems and all went through fine. In fact, it went through more than fine as we were supposed to have a Thai language test to prove we were actually doing what our visa said we were doing, but all they did was take our pictures and hand us our new visas. Considering how many classes we’ve missed between Covid-19 and random cancellations, this was indubitably a good thing.

My kitchen has had an invasion of cockroaches. Unfortunately I’m not surprised, though each day we didn’t find them inside made me cautiously hopeful we wouldn’t. Nonetheless, it is still a terrible and terrifying state of affairs. Geckos in my house are inevitable; I’m not sure why cockroaches exist. Just thought this petrifying situation could be a side note in your prayers for us. 

Great advances have been made in sorting out our homeschool/language school/studying/daily-running-of-the-house schedule. I wouldn’t say everything runs smoothly all the time (please tell me if you’ve figured this out in any situation) but we’re mitigating stress daily (well, maybe weekly).

There was a local lady and her family from our city in our last country that we were able to minister to during a very stressful and turbulent time in their lives. Needing a solution to the problem of not being able to stay in their home country, they moved to Chiang Mai after pursuing multiple unsuccessful options. Since their move, she has continually asked us to move here as well. I always responded that we would love to, but God hadn’t moved us in that direction. She told us she would keep praying that we would move to Chiang Mai. In this light, it is uncanny that we actually came here and now live approximately 10 minutes from her house. We are so excited to renew this friendship and be in their lives again. It seems Lance will especially have an important influence with her youngest son who is eight. As she has continually struggled with finding friends in this city, I am glad to be able to fill that gap. We recently got together with them for supper and a game night and hope to do so weekly. Please pray for us as we renew this relationship that we can again encourage her family. 

Also, in an interesting twist of events, my friend from the last paragraph recently introduced me to the lady who will be Amanda’s roommate once she’s able to come. (Amanda plans to be our homeschool helper.) The lady is wonderful and I was glad to meet her and see what she is like. I was tentative about this situation not knowing anything about who she was, but am thrilled now that I’ve met her. She is something of a mentor to my friend, and I was thankful to hear about this relationship as well.

– Ruth, for the Baker family.