SA Visa Update – No sigh of relief yet!

The Waiting Game..
Well we wanted to give everyone a quick update as we had talked about this big issue for the last couple of months and asked so many of you to pray. We went to the South African Embassy yesterday morning, queueing in the great british fashion from 8am til opening at 8.45am, we were the first in line. Everything was going well, we were called up and the documents that we have been preparing for the last 2 months were handed over, constituting x-ray reports, trips to the doctor, police checks worth about £600 in admin fees not including this trip to London, a lot was riding on this visa application.

The lady looked down at some paper work and spoke the dreaded words, “No, they won’t accept this!”. She pointed to the sponsoring letter from our missions organisation “All Nations”, “It hasn’t been signed”. So you’ll need to go and get it signed (immediately my mind began running, thinking of a way to get a signed letter from South Africa within the few days we had prepared to be in London). As I looked back at her trying to hide my shock, she said “You’ll need that, and you’ll need to bring back £600 (around $900) per person back with you for the ‘repatriation fee’ (should anything happen, the South African govt. aren’t keen on flying our coffins home unless we’ve paid for the ticket!). Finally she said, “If you can get that back to me by 10.30 (it now being around 9.15) we can take it today”

So frantically we ran to the nearest Internet Cafe and tried to call the office in South Africa that wrote our letter…the lady who had written it was overseas, and the letter had been on her computer! After an agonizing 40mins we printed the letters and ran to the bank, which didn’t open til 10AM!!!! With money in hand we sprinted back through trafalgar sq to Whitehall and handed in everything in disbelief we’d made it in time.

Our soon-made friend across the counter took our details and said, “OK, you’ll have to come back on the 28th”, confused thinking we would get a reply that day “we live 900 miles away in Scotland!” we said, so they allowed us to have the visa’s posted back to us. So here we are, not quite relieved from our anticipation of visa decisions, but we’ve done what we can and will hear in the next 7 days supposedly.

Please continue to pray for the process and we’ll let you know as soon as we do.

Thanks for all your support as we go through the ‘dramatic’ preparations for heading back to South Africa.