Second Letter of Invitation received!!!

October 6, 2008

Dear Partners,

We have arrived safely in California! Thanks for prayers. We have
received our Letter of Invitation for Kazakhstan!! Praise the Lord
and thanks for prayers again!

All necessary paperwork is either in the hands of our visa service or
on the way overnight. We need to pray now that the logistics to
procure one visa in San Francisco and one from Washington DC all
happen quickly. We need to have our passports back in our hands with
both appropriate visas glued into them by October 22 at the very
latest.

We have tickets to fly to Prague on Thursday, October 23 for the
meeting with The Mission Society and then tickets from there to
Kazakhstan. We have Letters of Invitation for visas to do
consulting work teaching conversational English at the language
school in Karaganda. We are looking forward to all the people we
will meet and friendships that we will renew. We will also have lots
of opportunity to improve our Russian as well.

Please join us in prayer for the visa process. It seems like we
request this a lot. Such is our life as impacted by the new Russian
laws for now. We have a game plan through October 2009 and then we
will take some furlough time here in the US. We look forward to
visiting churches and renewing friendships one on one with many of
you faithful Partners during that time at home.

Also, I have developed some really crummy muscle problems all over my
body and in places that I did not even know that I had muscles! They
have become progressively worse over the past several weeks. Except
for unusual fatigue I have no other symptoms and the MD thinks it may
be Lyme disease or West Nile Virus. We know that the mountains of
East Russia are full of Lyme disease (who knows about West Nile) and
we spent almost a week at summer camp there so it is definitely not
out of the realm of possibility. I have been so bummed because I
just got my knees in shape and was walking to the river with Claudia
and the dogs almost every evening (my dream before I had knee
surgery) in addition to all our running around town. By the time we
left Russia I was only doing all the errands and having trouble
getting on and off the buses again. Bummer. Today I donated 5 vials
of blood to the vampires at the lab and will go Friday to the MD and
see what turns up. Please pray that it is something that I can take
a good course of antibiotics for and be finished with it!!! I have
places to go, things to do and a great new knee!! :)

Blessings and hugs,

Carol