These past 2 weeks we have been dealing with legal issues
concerning the missionaries. In Guyana, missionaries who are not native
can only obtain a visa for 3 months. Then they have to leave the
country for a day or two and when they enter again they have their visa
stamped for another 3 months. When we arrived we only had ours stamped
for one month. So, in looking at the visas of the missionaries,
including ourselves, we found that there were eight of them who needed
to leave because their visas had expired. Even though none of the
couples visas had expired, they were due to expire in two weeks so 14 of
us had to renew our visas. This is time consuming and expensive
because we went to Suriname, the dutch speaking country to the east of
us. We had to travel on a ferry to cross the wide river separating the
two countries and then stay in a hotel overnight and return the next
day.
To further complicate things, one of the elders was
from Madagascar. The Suriname embassy took three days deciding whether
or not to allow him to get a Suriname visa so that he coud leave the
country. His name is Elder Andriamanantena and his country is
Madagascar. Most people here just laugh when he tells them where he is
from and what his name is. Apparantly there is a movie named
Madagascar that they are familiar with.
Anyway, We were told that there was no way he would be
able to reenter Guyana but we took him anyway and had a prayer in our
hearts that it would work out. After we arrived in Suriname we visited
th Guyana Consulate and they granted him a 6 month visa with the help of
80 US dollars. We were truly blessed. So all the elders are legal
again and we are all safely back home again.
It was really fun to visit Suriname. They are more
European in the building of their cities and they take pride in keeping
things clean. Our neighborhood here in Guyana is nice and clean but
much of the city of Georgetown has a big problem with littering the
streets.
I started teaching a family of three girls and one boy
how to play the piano this week. I spent an hour in their home,
teaching them the first lesson in the basic keyboard course that the
church publishes. They were given a keyboard by some missionaries a few
years ago and none of them had learned to play it. It was really fun.
The boy is named Aaron and he is only seven. When I taught him, all
the girls gathered around and wanted to help him hit the keys. The three
year old girl wanted to learn too, but she was too young.
Love from Elder and Sister Beutler
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