Residency Visa's with Canfields

Another week has quickly past......time seems to go by so quickly!  The weather is changing quickly too.  We've gone from the high 80's to a brisk temperature of the low to mid 60's in what seems like over night!  

Our work at the "office" is keeping us extremely busy.  Thank goodness we work with the most wonderful people.  Tony is busy with contracts and working with the problems that missions are having with residency Visa's with our missionaries all over Europe.  Our Visa's are good for 18 months but young missionaries stay for two years and not 18 months so all Visa's need to be extended.  The problem is that some missions include more than one country and missionaries are being transferred ever few months to different areas which can sometimes cause problems with their Visa's.....and that's when Tony has to step in and advise the missionary secretaries (who are usually young missionaries themselves), on the law and what to do to get these missionaries legal!  It takes quite a bit of thinking and working with outside council to work thru some of the more difficult strategies for these young missionaries.  If they only knew all the work that goes on in their behalf behind the scenes.........

I on the other hand am working with auditing Stake Presidents travel reimbursements.  I have learned to use Excel Spreadsheet and I am also learning to translate all different languages. Thank goodness for "google translate"......oh the wonders of technology!!!  I have also been asked, just this week to edit the articles that the General Authorities write for the European church magazine, the Liahona.  They write the article, it is sent to me where I read thru it and make grammatical corrections and re-format the article......wouldn't my English teachers be surprised!!!  I then send them over to the translation department to be translated into 18 different languages.  

Last week, the Canfield's who are new and Tony and I went downtown to the foreigners office to apply for our residency Visa's.  It required that we get there around 5:30AM and wait until the doors open at 1:00PM where we went into an office and handed them our passports and all the paper work that was filled out ahead of time.  They stamped our Visa's with a new picture and an added page making us legal.  While we waited 7 hours in the COLD, we had a fun time getting to know Steve and Anita Canfield.  Wonderful people, so talented.....we are going to be good friends.  They live in San Clemente, on the beach.  It will be fun to visit them after our missions.

This picture below is a picture of me and T. at the "waiting" line at the Government offices where we waited for "7" HOURS!!!

This is Steve and Anita Canfield from San Clemente, such nice people and they became immediate friends.  They have also served in Turkey and Russia.

This is our living room in the apartment that the church gives us.....I changed out a few things, like the carpet and pillows and throw.....thank goodness there is an IKEA here!  Cheap!  But at least now I feel a "little" more at home.

 I complained that there isn't enough storage in the kitchen and that we have an empty space where shelves should be so the church sent their handy man to put up two shelves for me!  So nice!  made my day!

So, this is what a mission is really like!  Exhausting!

We've had a lot of rain, almost every day and the days are getting shorter and much colder!  I had a
frustrating day this past week, I wanted to go down to the "mall" and just look around on Friday, but I COULDN'T FIND IT!  It is so difficult to drive a car here, if I had found it, I would not have known where to park so it was just as well...................Next time I'll take the Ubahn!!!