Thursday evening at about 8pm I (Elin) was browsing through some of our documents, checking dates and so forth, when suddenly I saw that my work permit/visa had expired the end of LAST month! This sent us into a bit of a whirlwind as we started making calls to find out what we had to do to correct this. We were told that there was a fine of almost $30 a day for each day we were “overdue” and that we had better get to our provincial capital ASAP to deal with it. So, we threw together bags (not knowing how many days this would take) and took off at 3:30 am to drive to the city of Quelimane. To further complicate things our car has been having engine and shock problems and we had been told not to take it on long trips until the replacement parts come! With all the rains we have been getting you can only imagine the state of the roads we had to take (4 hours on dirt, 1 hour on pavement). But, we arrived intact and went directly to the immigration office. Praise the Lord, the late fee was only $3 a day not $30 and in the end they never charged us for that. We ran around town getting signatures and money and by noon we had completed all the paperwork for both Phil and I’s work permits for the next year. These new permits are very chic and easy on the eyes but hard on the pocketbook 🙂 – costing approximately $620 each (annually!). Fortunately the kid’s ones last longer and don’t expire until 2016!! PTL!!! We had a quick lunch with coworkers that live in town there and then decided to head back home that day. Despite a lot of rain we made it back by 7:30 p.m. completing a very long and tiring day. Still, we are thanking the Lord for bringing this to our attention and also for the speed in which we could deal with it! It felt like we hardly missed a beat 🙂 although we did sleep in later than usual this morning! 🙂 Pray for Phil as he missed out on a day of lesson preparation for this next week and will now need to make this day up somehow.