NO RE-ENTRY!

A family was divided the other day because the husband had a business visa and the wife and children had tourism visas.  The wife and children were on the next plane back to the states, the husband was allowed to continue with his business in India.  Hundreds of folks had their visa stamped with “NO REENTRY” upon their most recent arrival in India.  One guy got lippy with a govt. official about the visa rule changes and his visa was actually torn from his passport!

Is it all true?  That’s the thing about India…”Someone once said that whatever you say about India, the opposite is also true.  Indian systems of thought can handle this kind of paradox.  One philosophical argument for each apparent contradictions uses the simple illustration of a room.  To a person who enters the room after a winter’s walk, the room is warm.  To the person who has been sitting there all day, it is not warm.  So the room is warm; the room is not warm; the room is at the same time warm and not warm; and the real nature of the room remains undescribed by any of these standards.”  Culture Shock India.

Noteables:

• Because of Indian visa rule changes we must now apply for Employment Visas (costly and time consuming – visa processing 5 days - we depart in 20).
• Our home continues to stay on the market, but we are trusting that it will be rented prior to our departur
•  We continue to proceed by faith that everything will work out prior to our departure and we will be able to depart on time.

Visa processing.

Employment visas require over 12 items of documentation.  Crazy!

Born profoundly deaf, the Root children now have cochlear implants.

This is a fairly good story on cochlear implants, how they work and what a family has to go through when they decide to implant their children.  The coolest thing about this story, for me, is to hear how well these girls speak. It makes me excited to envision what Priya will be like 10 years from now. Click here to check it out.

Hearing Birthday!

Our sweet, little Priya turned 2 yesterday and had her 1 year anniversary of hearing with cochlear implants.  One year ago we were wondering if she could hear anything and a year later she was singing along to happy birthday with us.

One Way Journey

The flight departs Omaha on January 11^th at 12:10pm and arrives Delhi on January 12^th at 9:45pm.  For those of you who are keeping score at home that’s 2 adults, 3 children, 10 fifty pound bags, and 1 fifteen hour flight.   There is something weird about having a date of departure and a one-way ticket.  It has always been something that we were planning on, something we were going to do.  Now, we simply depart on January 11^th, 2009.  Carrie and I cracked up at the thought of all our future round-trip tickets beginning and ending in Delhi.  That’s different.

Notables:

• Priya has been accepted by the Moog School, in St. Louis, as a distance student. We will visit the school on December 7 & 8th for preliminary evaluations and planning. This is huge for us.
• Our home will show for the first time tomorrow evening!  We are waiting patiently for the right renter to be provided.  Our desire is that our place will be rented before the 15^th of December.
• We continue to meet with folks who are interested in supporting us.  We are still just 15% (approximately $650/month) short of our monthly support need.  If you are not already, please consider joining our monthly support team. Click here for more info. 

Pulling Up the Roots

The book Third Culture Kids talks about a life of uprootedness (living a highly mobile life that requires continually pulling up your “roots” and settling down in a new location).  We began this process in our family as the “For Rent” sign was firmly planted in our front yard.  We hope to have one-way tickets from Omaha to Delhi purchased by the end of this week and we realize that all of this transition is going to be hard.  Not because we don’t want to go to India or because we don’t trust our calling, but because we’re human.  We love our family and friends and we’ll miss them, we like Omaha (when it’s not blazing hot or totally freezing) and the familiarity of being “home”, and because it takes way more time, energy and emotion to pack up all our stuff and leave than we thought.

Noteables:

• ·     We continue to trust that our home will be rented to a family that needs a good place to land.
• ·     This is a big transition for our family (Hudson recently asked how we are going to move our house to India).
• ·     Please join us in celebrating Priya’s first hearing birthday November 5!  Praise God for giving us the opportunity for her to have cochlear implants.  Thanks to those of you who are praying for Priya.

If you know of anyone looking for a home to rent in Omaha…have them check out our place at http://www.cambiargroup.com/