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July 6th – August 3rd
Once our Columbian border fiasco was behind us, we now had 3 objectives:

1. concentrate more on the ministry
2. look harder for a house to rent
3. try to keep our lawyer on track with our visas

The first two items blended together one day when I went to my bible study, Anabel. At the end of the study she said she had found a house for rent if we were interested. She gave me the name of the owner who was someone she knew very well all her life and was married to a doctor. They had moved to Ibarra and so the house was vacant. It had 3 bedrooms (check); It was in town, so close to shopping and bus-routes (check);  We went to see it and the first thing I spotted as we entered the door was… yup, a fireplace! (check); It had some ambience because of the marble floor down and wood floors up plus a few Spanish type architectural features and a nice little ‘courtyard’ where I could envision putting lots of plants to give it some ‘nature ambience’. I would definitely have to give it an ‘old world’ paint job though to complete the cozy atmosphere I so needed. (check); It was partly furnished with…everything we DIDN’T have… so (check); I looked in the main floor bathroom…no tub…I looked in the 2nd floor bathroom…shower, but no tub…looked in the ensuite…no tub. Hmmm… no check for that, but since it was the ONLY thing on the list that was missing, I figured I could live with that. It also had a bonus roof terrace with clothelines which were covered so laundry could be hung out rain or shine! A rarity in Ecuador! It also had an awesome view of the two volcanoes on either side of Otavalo, Cotacachi and Imbabura! So, we decided to take it! The landlady said she would have it cleaned and painted and it would be ready in 3 weeks. I asked if I could pick out the paint colours and she agreed. Perfect. We gave our notice at the apartment.

The house is in a little gated community of adjoining houses. Usually these gated communities in Ecuador are built by and inhabited by gringos, but this one is different… we are the ONLY gringos here!
As you can see, there are three floors: main floor has the living room, kitchen/dining, el banyo social (the social bathroom), and the small courtyard or enclosed patio. Second floor has the three bedrooms (however the landlady only wanted us to use two of them because she wanted to keep the third one for storage 🙁 ) The master bedroom is humungous and has a small ensuite bathroom. We use the second bedroom as the office.

Here are some before and after shots of the house:

before

after

before

after

>June 30th to July 5th:  What a dilemma! Should we book a flight home to Canada? Should we book a flight to somewhere else? Like Belize maybe? That sounded so comforting when we were in such turmoil and frustration with all the red tape and agonizing waiting over trying to get visas to stay in a place where I’m always freezing at night anyway! Ahhh… the warmth of the Caribbean! But, maybe this was just Satan tempting us to give up! We were having success in the ministry here…so many people we met seemed really hungry for Bible truth! The little English group had so much territory to cover…from Cayumbe in the south all the way to the Columbian border in the north! It had seemed that Jehovah had directed us here. Isaac and Jo were certainly needed in their sign-language group in Otavalo! So, after much prayerful deliberation, and the fact that a brother near the Columbian border had offered to help us and put us up for the night, we decided we should go ahead and try it! That Saturday, July 2nd  we, along with Monica, caught a bus to Tulcan, a city on the Ecuadorian side of the Columbian border. We had been quite nervous about going near the Columbian border because of the warnings on the Canadian government website, but after checking that information again before making our final decision, we saw that it said ‘with the exception of Tulcan’… that was sort of reassuring… sort of.

Bus rides in Ecuador are always memorable, and I’m not talking strictly about the scenery, although that is often pretty awesome, no, I’m talking about the terror! Wide-eyed, white-knuckle terror! I’ll spare you the details. All you can do is sit somewhere where you can’t see the road ahead, pray and occupy yourself with something distracting!
What I find the best is to focus on the beauty of creation wizzing by and imagine what this country will be like in the new system, sauntering along by horseback or walking through the rolling countryside dotted with palms, banana trees and adobe houses.The scenery became more and more breathtaking the closer we got to Tulcan!

Finally, after a 3 hour ride, we reached our destination and grabbed a taxi to take us to the border crossing where the brother was to meet us and give us instructions.
To make this long story short, we stood in line to get stamped out of Ecuador for a couple of hours, then walked over to the Columbian border entrance and stood in that line for another couple of hours… got our passports stamped entering Columbia, then because it’s dangerous to stay in the border town on the Columbian side, we went back to the brother’s house on the Tulcan side to spend the night safe and secure at his home. What a wonderful brotherhood we have! The next morning he drove us back to the Columbian side to once again stand in the long line to get our passports stamped out of Columbia, and then back over to the Ecuadorian side to get stamped into Ecuador. After another long prayerful wait in line, finally it was our turn to go to the counter. We went to separate windows. At my window, the official carefully perused my passport with suspicion walked over to the official who was doing the same with Richard’s, had a lengthy exchange of words in Spanish, came back to me and said…in Spanish… what I gleaned to mean that I could go through, but ‘no esposo’ (no husband)!! I said ‘no entiendo’ (I don’t understand)… so he got someone from the lineup behind me to translate. Basically he wanted to know if I wanted to go ahead without my husband!! Of course, I said no way! The kind German man who was interpreting got right into it and wanted to know why so he was sent over to Richard’s window to get the explanation. Came back to me and said that according to the record on the computer, Richard could not get another 90 days because it said he had already used up two visas concurrently… the official who stamped his passport in Quito back in January had stamped the correct 180 day visa into his passport, but had entered a 90 day T3 visa into the computer!! And, of course, this could not be undone at a border crossing… only in Quito! So, now, we were technically ‘stuck in Columbia’! We went out of the immigration office in a daze wondering what we should do now! The brother and Monica were waiting for us and when we explained what had happened, the brother took Richard’s passport and marched back inside and straight up to the guard, explained the situation and was taken straight up to the window where Richard had been rejected. After hearing the reason for himself and seeing the mistake on the computer, he got out his cell phone and called up one of his Bible studies… guess who he was… the chief of the immigration police! After hearing the situation he asked to speak with the guard, who, once realizing who he was speaking to, was suddenly very attentive and gave permission to our brother to take us to his home for the night with instructions to go to the Ecuadorian Embassy in Columbia on Tuesday (because Monday was a holiday) and Richard would be able to purchase a visa there. (weird, eh).

Richard on the border bridge between Ecuador and Columbia.

Anyway, that is exactly what happened, and after a few minor snags, they did give Richard a visa, which he had to pay for, but it was only for 60 days, whereas I was given the 90 day stamp.
In the meantime, we got to attend the Sunday meeting in Tulcan, which we couldn’t understand but it was fun to meet the friends there!
We also toured around Tulcan for a few hours and took some interesting pictures of a very  unique cemetery there! Here are some pictures:

Here we are at the entrance to a labrynth…all the trees are sculpted into shapes

Richard does the ‘typical’ pose

Note how folks are buried here, in tombs above ground

Next day we headed back to Otavalo, confident and relieved that we were both legally back in Ecuador and now had 60 more days to accomplish the task of obtaining our work visas! Surely that would be enough time!

>On June 6th, we had a smooth series of flights, without incident, and another successful landing at Quito airport, one of the steepest descents and shortest runways in the world! Thankfully, they are nearing completion of a brand new airport (with Canadian money incidentally) and it will actually be closer to Otavalo where we live!
It was ironic that Isaac & Jo were not there to meet us because they had flown home to Winnipeg the day before! As I mentioned in my last entry, their 12-VII visas were expiring, so to save money they decided to use the return ticket they still had which was for July 5th!
We stayed at our usual B&B in the historic area of Quito overnight and the next morning met Monica, (the sister in our English group who is helping us get our visas) at the lawyers’ office.
The lawyer seemed very efficient and smoothly took us through all the paperwork necessary to set up the corporation. She assured us there was no problem that our visas were going to expire in 1 month.
She gave us a short list of things she wanted us to obtain within three weeks, like our ‘official’ marriage certificates as well as Isaac and Jo’s, and a couple of other items I can’t recall now.
So, we went home to our apartment in Otavalo tired but confident that things were rolling smoothly toward completion. It was sad to see the apartment next door looking all lonely for its now absent occupants, Isaac and Jo, but the resident dog, Tita, sure gave us a warm welcome with her tail wagging and yelps of glee.
We attended the meeting that night and it was good to see the friends again and meet new ones who had come to help out for a few months. Some were missing though, who had gone back to their home countries for various reasons like making more money so they could return for another year. When there are only 16 publishers, it leaves a large hole when anyone is missing, but that’s where the regular stream of visitors ‘spying out the land’ come in handy! We learned that while we were away for two months, some of the visitors that came were definitely coming back! Included were a couple of elders and their families, so that was great news, since also while were gone, one of the two elders in our English group had left to go to the Spanish congregation in Otavalo!
Well, we managed to obtain the documents the lawyer wanted, within the time she had asked for them. Those three weeks flew by as we had decided to look for other housing and our days were spent pounding the pavement… well, cobblestone, I guess…looking for ‘Se Arriendo’ signs (for rent). That’s the way you have to do it here. There is no local newspaper to look up the classifieds, not even bulletin boards where people could post ads. It’s all word of mouth, or signs in the windows. We did find a few apartments and/or houses for rent and looked at a couple, but nothing was suitable. I didn’t want to move out of our apartment unless we found exactly what we were looking for.

• It had to have at least 2 bedrooms (so if any of you want to come to visit we’d have a place for you to sleep)
• It had to be within walking distance of shopping and bus routes
• It had to have a fireplace (I’m always freezing in the evenings up here in the mountains and the houses don’t generally have a heat source)
• I was hoping for a bathtub (most places only have showers)
• It had to have some ‘ambience’ (I know, doesn’t seem important, but to me, it makes the difference between whether I get depressed or not)
• It had to be under $250/month
• It would be nice if it was at least partly furnished because we didn’t want to spend any more money on furniture.

Meanwhile, the clock was ticking on our visas which were going to expire on July 4th… in only a few days, and no news from the lawyer on our work visas 🙁
So, Monica contacted her again and what she was told, was very disturbing news for us. She wanted us to go across the border to Columbia (scary enough right there!) and stay for 24 hours (even scarier) then return so they would stamp our passports with a 90 day tourist visa. Now, I had read about people trying that method of staying in Ecuador longer, but many had failed! It just depends, it seems, on the mood of the guy behind the counter that day! Plus, we weren’t sure it was even legal! We decided against it, and started looking for deals on plane tickets!

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Home sweet home… what’s wrong with this picture? This is what greeted us when we arrived back at Ballantyne’s Cove… lots of work! Here it was the month of April, when everyone is geared up for increased service… even the incentive of being able to auxilliary with only 30 hours was tugging at our hearts. But, we had a mandate that we felt was equally important for us at that time: Get our house ready to sell so we could return to Ecuador before our visas expired. We had to do this if we were to reach our goal of serving in Ecuador.
Memorial was right around the corner, though, so first things first… we got out and invited as many as we could, and then we dove into the renovation work!

What lay ahead was intimidating, but we knew if Jehovah wanted us back in Ecuador, he knew we needed to sell the house, so he would also help us complete the work necessary in time. (yes, that is a room gutted right down to the dirt). The only bathroom in the house was the upstairs ensuite in the 2nd bedroom, so to make it saleable, we needed to turn this gutted room into a main bathroom and family room/front entranceway. If that wasn’t enough, we needed to put a ceiling in the 2nd bedroom, build a rock planter, plant a lawn and find a large rock to install as the front step.

starting to take shape

all done!

another view

dunno… think it’s big enough?

voila! lawn & rock planter

all ready for the market

Wow, looked fast and easy with those few pictures! Uh-uh, no way. It was two months straight of hard physical labour for both of us. We did have some help from friends and family even though it was a month of increased Kingdom activity! Thanks every one of you! We wouldn’t have made our deadline without your help!

There were many obstacles encountered while trying to complete the house in time, but those were not as critical as the one that loomed up in front of us just two weeks before we were booked to return to Ecuador! On May 12th we received the message that 12-VII missionary visas were no longer available to folks like us who were going to serve in Ecuador because of the need. This was such a huge shock since we had already been accepted by the branch to apply for the visa. We didn’t know whether we would be able to continue our plans or not! Plus, Isaac & Jo’s 12-VII visas were about to expire soon! How would they now be able to stay in Ecuador?! Hundreds of other brothers and sisters were being affected by this change…surely Jehovah would provide answers to the thousands of prayers now being sent over this issue! We spent 4 days stressing over it, then prayerfully wrote and sent off an email to the branch in Ecuador to ask whether we would be affected by the change (shouldn’t have waited four days!!) and our relief came within hours as they replied saying because we had already been accepted, we could continue our plans. Whew! However, this didn’t help Isaac and Jo who only had a couple of months left on their visas! So, back to the prayers! The answer to this one came after Isaac did some checking around with other brothers in the same situation and learned of an alternative route we could try. Setting up a corporation in Ecuador, then applying for work visas for the 4 of us to work for our corporation. So, wheels were set in motion…help from a sister in Ecuador who arranged for an appointment with an immigration lawyer for the day after we were to arrive back in Ecuador.

The last week or so was a blur… we worked on the house right up to the day before we left… amidst the packing, sorting of items for the garage sale that was to happen after we left, trying to sell the car and of course continuing our research of our new visa alternative. Just a hair short of a nervous breakdown, we bid farewell to the loving friends and family who worked selflessly cleaning, packing, painting, etc to the bitter end to insure we could leave satisfied that the house was ready for sale!
Thus, on June 5th we left all of them and our now lovely home behind, drove our now sold car to Halifax where the buyer would be waiting to pay for it and drop us off at our airport hotel… another prayer obviously answered! Next morning, though I was suffering from stress-triggered dizziness and nausea, we caught our 6:15 plane for Ecuador!

>On April 4th, our first three months in Ecuador came to an end on the last day of the visit of the C.O. to our English group. This served to boost our determination to try and get back to Ecuador as quickly as possible as he really emphasized the need in English, not only in the area we were in, but in all of Ecuador! It was a nice place to leave it.
So, we got a ride to Quito with Brian and spent the night in our favourite B&B (Jumbo Lodging in the ‘Centro Historico’ district of Quito). We arrived at the airport the next morning bright and early as our flight was leaving at 6:15AM. All was going well until we hit the customs booth. The lady checked our passports and said we couldn’t leave Ecuador without a ‘censo card’! What?!! We were thinking there had to be some mistake. We were familiar with brothers and sisters having to get censo cards, but were sure it didn’t apply to us because we were there on a six month tourist visa! We had followed all the directions we were told by the Ecuadorian embassy when we received our visas which included making sure we registered our visas within the required 30 days of arriving in Ecuador! It was difficult trying to reason with the person behind the window since they spoke absolutely no English. She finally called the American Airlines desk who sent a representative down to help us out. Speaking in Spanish to the customs officer it seemed she was attempting to defend our point that a censo card was not required with tourist visas, but she was not winning the argument. So, she led us to the American Airlines desk and tried to explain to us in her scanty English that we could not take our flight back to Canada until we had a censo card…(which brought about a flood of tears) and tried to show us what we needed to do to get it.  This involved taking a taxi back into downtown Quito to the Immigration office, which did not open until 8AM (our flight was leaving at 6:30AM).She reassured us that she would re-book our entire flight itinerary and that there was another flight to Miami leaving at 9:30AM. She did everything she could to make it easier for us… taking us up to the customs office at the airport and explaining to them our plight. The man there explained what documents we were going to need and what we should do to expedite the process…even making photocopies of our passports for us which we were going to need and writing down the address of the Immigration office to show the taxi driver. He also said we would need brown manila envelopes to put the documents in which were sold in a store beside the Immigration office. They warned us, though, that we would have to get back to the American Airlines desk no later than 8:45 in order to board the 9:30 flight!!
So, off we went…we took note of how long the taxi ride took so we’d know how long it would take to get back to the airport after getting our censo cards. When we arrived at the office, there was already a lineup outside. We dashed into the little store to buy the envelopes. The lady there was very helpful, even explaining to us that we would also need an electric bill or something that showed an address in Ecuador. When we said we didn’t have such a thing on us, she said she would give us one of hers to use! Then rushed us to the lineup, marched up to the locked door and knocked on it until someone came. There was an interchange of urgent-sounding words between them which we deduced were attempts to get us in sooner because of our imminent flight, without success. So, she stood in the line for us while her daughter in the store took care of our document needs. Unbelievable! Richie naturally gave her a generous tip!
We finally got in and out of that office after an agonizing wait, checking my watch every few minutes! Hailed a cab, checked the watch again… yikes! only a few minutes left to get back to the airport! We ran when we got out of the cab… through the airport to the desk… the clock there said 8:50!! Oh no! The kind lady spotted us, beckoned us to the desk, rushed through some necessary paperwork and ran with us to the boarding gate… just in time to get on! Whew!
So, that was stressful enough, but… by the time we got to New York JFK airport, the flight from there to Halifax we were booked on had been cancelled due to bad weather in Halifax, so American Airlines re-booked us on a Delta Airlines flight that same day which they said was still going to Halifax, so we hauled everything over to the Delta wing of  JFK and went to check in at the desk, but when we arrived there, the book we’d just been re-scheduled on was cancelled also. So, they booked us on a flight for the next morning… but they only had ‘stand-by’ available. We took it, but we had to spend the night in JFK… horrible night… between the loud music ALL night and being really nervous I didn’t sleep a wink! Delta had given us food vouchers for dinner and breakfast the next morning, which was big of them, but it would have been nice if they had also provided lodging vouchers. Anyway, after breakfast the next morning we checked in again at the Delta desk and waited to see if we were going to get on… stand-by is only good if someone cancels or doesn’t show up by boarding time… suddenly they said over the speaker that … guess what… they were having to reduce the number of passengers on the flight because of an overweight problem!! Arghhh… they were asking for six people who had tickets for the flight to volunteer to go the next day… so, it was obvious we weren’t getting on THAT flight!! Which meant… yep,  another sleepless night in JFK… NOT!! There was no way I was doing that again… I went to the counter and asked (read begged) that we be given a lodging voucher because this wasn’t our fault! No way, they said because the original problem was ‘weather related’ we didn’t qualify for lodging vouchers. Well, I would have paid $500 at that point to sleep in a hotel, but when we actually found a shuttle to take us to the nearest hotel, which was a Howard Johnson, it ended up only costing $100! Amazing for New York City I thought. That was way less than we paid at the Holiday Express at Halifax airport!! It was weird, though, being in New York City, looking out the hotel window and seeing…. no, not the statue of liberty, but what looked like the back parking lot of Walmart back in Antigonish… sigh. Kind of disappointing, but, a hot shower and a refreshing night’s sleep were soooo welcome! Next morning we were finally on our way home!
We took a bus from Halifax airport to Antigonish, and the thing that struck me the most along the way was CLEAN… everything looked sooooo clean!