Our Mission is Changing

Our first blog entry is from Paula's family letter describing our initial mission call. Since then there have been several changes. This is a list for our own history.

We received our call in mid November with a reporting date to the MTC of March 15, 2010. Plenty of time. Al we have to do is some shopping, get Visas for Belgium and France, study Preach My Gospel and learn some French, since we will be living in Brussels and Brussels is a French speaking city.

A FBI fingerprint check is required for the Belgian Visa, not required for the French Visa. We submitted the fingerprints on November 17 and they were returned in four weeks. Unfortunately Paula's were too smudged and couldn't be read. We re-submitted Paula's fingerprints in late December and they were received by the FBI on Jan 4. Remember that date.

We started checking with the FBI a week after the fingerprints arrived in Charleston, WV and we were told, "Fingerprint checks are taking 10 weeks". With considerable frustration we continued to check weekly until today when we were told, "The new time for fingerprint processing is 13 weeks as of today". "How 'bout if we submitted them in January?" "Yup. Still 13 weeks".

Our original MTC date was March 15. When we started running into a delay with the FBI, Paula talked with the Missionary Travel Office and they said, "There's also 6 to 8 weeks required to process the Belgian Visa. Let's see - Jan 4, plus 13 weeks - that's about April 5th. Plus 6 weeks, that's May 17th. March 15 isn't looking too good. So now we wonder when we will get to the MTC. Hopefully before May. We're praying for a miracle.

The other really significant change is that the Belgium Brussels/Netherlands Mission will cease to exist on March 1st. The French speaking part of the mission will go to the France Paris Mission and the Dutch speaking part will be come a new Netherlands Amsterdam (?) Mission. We spoke with President Brubaker , our mission president, last week and he will become the mission president for the new mission and we will be going with him. The Netherlands Mission office will be in Brussels until a location is determined for the office in the Netherlands (4-6 months), so we will go to Brussels initially and then move to the Netherlands (if we can get Visas before then - I hope I'm just kidding). The French we've been trying to learn may be very temporary. We've asked the MTC to get us a Dutch tutor and that's in process. President and Sister Brubaker said not to worry too much about the Dutch as most of the people in the Netherlands speak English.