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Dear friends:
Marty should be in Africa right now and is still sitting in
Pennsylvania. We would ask for special prayer today regarding his
passport situation as his passport travels today by special courier.
It is a tangled story that shows U. S. bureaucracy can be as
convoluted as any developing nation. With this year's travels, Marty's
passport has been filling up rapidly, but with a 12-week wait right
now on anything but an emergency travel situation even for expedited
passports (due to Canada and Mexico crossings now requiring passports,
the backlog for American passports is months long, so if you're
traveling, get in now!), he hasn't been off the road long enough to
relinquish his passport. No problem, he had several pages and partial
pages left. Then the travel agent BCM uses got his visas, a full page
for Mozambique, etc. South Africa is one of those countries that just
fills out a visa on the plane (usually meaning just a stamp on the
corner of some page anywhere in the passport), and since Marty had
several hardly used pages left (along with a number of blank auxiliary
pages), it seems the travel agent didn't check requirements, because
when they arrived at the airport, South Africa Airlines wouldn't even
let him on the plane, saying he'd need a full page just for their visa
stamp on the other end and the auxiliary pages couldn't be used (our
experience is that the smaller and poorer the country, the bigger the
visa stamp and the longer and more hard-nosed their lists of
requirements!)
Marty and Larry (our video-journalist traveling with Marty) spent
hours trying to get into a passport office anywhere, but even the
emergency backlog was going to be at least two weeks. Meanwhile
African leaders from five countries are waiting for him to arrive.
They are insistent Marty has to be there for decisions that have to be
made, even if they have to wait for him a few days. The
travel agent offered to return his commission but just threw up his
hands and said he couldn't do anything. But God has opened the doors
through a young Christian travel agent in the church we attend who
over the weekend was able to get Marty's passport into a special
courier this morning to get extra pages, hopefully to be returned by
Wednesday morning, which would allow them to fly out Wednesday night.
Please pray that this all comes together; Friday night we--and many
others--prayed for a miracle that didn't seem possible; by Saturday
morning the door had opened. If God wants Marty at this conference, it
will happen, but we would deeply appreciate your prayers throughout
this process.
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