We had a very interesting day, Jim and I, when we went to the capital last week. we are taking out residency here in the country, and had to go to the capital to get some documents stamped and to get letters from the National Police saying that we are not bad people. And this can only be done in the capital. So our thinking was: get there early, avoid some of the traffic (which is akin to that of Miami, but with worse drivers… much, much worse). The trip down was going fine up until the point 30 minutes north of Santo Domingo near a town called Villa Altagracia. We were stopped by a huge roadblock. Almost a thousand people had blocked the highway (both ways) protesting the fact that many people had died trying to cross the highway because their was no pedestrian bridge. The protest (called a “huelga” here in the DR) lasted for over two hours, until a mini-battalion of military and police started to shoot off their machine guns and fire smoke grenades. It was not pretty. We were praying that no one got hurt.

We finally made it to the capital, and after two failed attempts, finally located the building we needed to get our letters of good conduct. After a good half-hour, we made it in, got our letters paid for, and then had to wait another hour to pick up the letters. Once we got them, we discovered that two off them had printing errors, so we had to wait another half-hour to get them redone. Finally, praise the Lord, we got all the letters, except for Jim and Renee’s two boys’ letters. Since they were minors, we were told that we had to go to another building for this. Upon arriving at that building we were rejected entry because we were wearing sandals. But praise the Lord, the manager came and escorted us to the appropriate office. We discovered that we needed to find color pictures of the two boys (who were not with us), and with some quick thinking and praying, managed to get some color copies of their passport photos, which worked out in the end.

After a long day, Jim and I, the two sandal-shod gringos, headed home tired, but thankful to the Lord that we got all the residency document stamps and letters done. God granted us entry into all the buildings we needed to be in, and favour with the people we met. Please continue to pray for us as we finish up the residency process in the next few days and will need to make one final trip to Santo Domingo to deposit all of our documents.

~Ryan