1) Visited ST’s brother and sis-in-law and nephew and new niece in our transit in Baltimore. Visited also a few museums and historic sites such as the Abraham Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. It was a fruitful time catching up and having fun with the family. Thanks for hosting us and taking care of PR when she was sick.

2) Administrative work in Singapore: renewed passports, adjusted CPF – HDB flat payments, insurance admin, made new IC (Peiru), closed inactive bank accounts, notarized our certs with a notary public and the new Ecuador Embassy in Singapore! Thanks Sham, for helping us again! Praise God we were able to get new passports in just 3 days so we could go to the Chiangmai Global Conference! And Praise God there’s an Ecuador embassy in Singapore now! Woohoo!

3) Spent fruitful time with ST’s family – Finally after more than 10 years of the 3 sons in the family studying and/or living overseas, the 3 brothers and parents were back in Singapore all at the same time! It was a great family reunion and we enjoyed doing sports, having meals together, lao yu sheng, shopping, catching up and having fun with our nephew and niece and other relatives.

4) Spent fruitful time with PR’s family – PR’s mum gave her a new haircut, we visited Chinatown Chinese New Year Market together, caught up with some relatives, visited PR’s grandmothers and aunt, had an early reunion dinner with the family together with PR’s bro (who’s currently working in HK) and sis-in-law, shared Christ with one of PR’s grandmother in broken Hokkien and part Chinese and she received Christ!! PTL!! God is faithful! God keep her faith firm and send people to encourage her and remind her of His love!

5) Went to HIM 2012 Global Conference at Chiangmai on a Missional Church:
a) God confirmed the church direction we were working on for 2012, Hope Quito! Amen! Personal growth, discipleship and leadership training!
b) Learnt much from the different pastors, refreshed spiritually and touched by God’s voice and teachings.
c) Caught up with great friends and made new friends too – Peru team (Teck Keong and Siew Yee) and Cambodia team (Guoqiang, TH, Huijin, Yvonne), and Julian, Ps Ben, Claudia, Brisbane friends, Ps Denis Lu, Singapore unit group etc.
d) Thai food! Yumz!

6) Visited the old and new sanctuaries – Nexus and Axis! May the Lord’s presence be greatly felt in all worship services and events in Axis and God bless the church taking over Nexus abundantly too!

7) Caught up with (or some, we were not able to) and encouraged by old friends, shepherds and sheep in Singapore… Lydia, Huiqing, Mei, Jennifer, Kelvin, Jianming, SiewChoo, Clara, Jieyun, Sharon, Liyi, Wenjiang, David Chan, Ben and Petrina, Ee Lee, Charmaine, Alan, Serene, Xingni, Qianru, Timothy and others in the uni group, Yeu Ann, Huaqiang and Sarah (and Phoebe and baby coming), Jeremy Joel Jeroi, Tony, Siew Qin, Weeleng and Wanphing (and Celeste!), Julian Serene Delia Ailay, Ps Jeff etc. etc.
To all of you, whether we were able to meet up or not… thank you so much for being supportive and loving and an inspiration. Thank you for your faithful friendship and prayers.
Thanks, WJ for sending us to and fro the airport and for praying for us!
And God bless all the new families and babies!
And may God anoint and keep on spreading his love through all the missions efforts on-going and up-coming!

Photos have been posted on Phoebe’s FB.

Santiago plays the double bass, electric bass and shakers in the Quito Symphonic Band. It was my first time seeing singers singing with a symphonic band. Some of them sang in opera style and some sang in modern style. All the Christmas carols were beautifully sung!

It was a new experience for me as we listened to Christmas carols with a big live band behind. Some of the lyrics in the Christmas carols were very ministering as they talked about the coming of Jesus and praising the King. Below are some photos:

1) Pray for our church members to be evangelistic during this thanksgiving and Christmas season. We are going to bless the community through projects with Pan de Vida on 27 Nov and 18 Dec. Pray that our members will be opportunistic and invitational during this season.

2) Pray for wisdom in planning for our Reach Club events. We started our club 2 months ago with 15 members. As we have many programs during these 2 months, pray that everything we do will be streamlined and strategic.

3) Pray for clear direction and vision as we plan for 2012. We are currently evaluating, praying and thinking what we would like to do in 2012. Pray for us to be sensitive to what God wants to do.

Do pray along with us as you read this blog entry. Thanks so much!

Our visa was going to expire on the 30th August this year and we started the visa application 3 weeks before it expired. This should have been just enough time, also so that we could maximise the visa validity period. However, this year, the government had implemented a new requirement for the work visa that we were holding onto. We were required to apply for a certificate online (the certificate has a super long name.. basically it’s a certificate we need to get to certify that we were working with our institute legally and etc. ). We had to have this certificate in order to start renewing our work visa.

The website stated that it required at least 10 working days for the application of the certificate. We waited for 2 weeks and there was still no reply! During this time, we prayed hard but at the same time, there was a peace and a certain excitement in our heart that God would provide a way.

2 days before our visa expired, we went to file our taxes (this was another requirement if we wanted to renew our visa) and the accountant that we met was extremely kind. He found out about our situation and offered to help us as he knew someone who had connections in the ministry and might be able to help us find out why our application for the cert had not yet been approved. Within a single day, he contacted this professor, we met him at night and he was also kind enough to want to leave early from one of his appointments the next day in order to help us because we were really running out of time! We were really surprised by the offer!

The next day, we checked our mails and received the rejection emails from the ministry. They had not approved the application for the certificate! We also consulted the director of our school and she advised us against receiving help from the accountant… Hmmm… this was a strange twist of events but we thought it was also true that since our application had been rejected, we were not sure how the accountant and profesor could help us any further… so we decided to kindly reject the offer of help from the accountant. Meanwhile, we had also consulted a lawyer who had helped another teacher with his application and her assistant had told us that we could simply try applying for another visa as quickly as we could. The next easiest option was the student visa, since we were also studying Spanish at our school. So Eduardo, our administrator helped us do up the documents within the day and the next day, we went early in the morning to be in the queue for the application.

As we were applying for a student visa, Eduardo advised us to not speak too much in Spanish… haha.. yet at the same time, we did not want to lie. While we were waiting in the queue, ST reminded me of the testimony of Brother Yun (from the book, The Heavenly Man) where he was at the customs and simply trusted that God would help him through, so he kept silent but maintained faith and a confident look on his face. And God helped him pass through the customs without any issues. So we decided to trust in God and keep silent but also be truthful.

God is faithful! Amazingly, our visa was approved very quickly by the officer, no questions asked! We told Eduardo and he was very amazed and kept saying that God’s hand was upon us as it was really amazing that it was the last day of validity and everything went so smoothly! (He had actually tried to apply for this visa for us the previous year and our application had been rejected the previous year because the visa officers had said that we were already in Quito for 2 years then, we should be able to speak Spanish so we needn’t study anymore..)

Praise the Lord! Once again, He saved us at the very final and appropriate moment!
We thank God for this amazing testimony -
1) His beautiful timing and for helping us to trust in Him. It seems.. God really wants us here. Haha..!
2) Usually, the student visa is only approved for half a year. Ours was approved for an entire year! PTL!
3) Eduardo is a new believer and this was an amazing testimony for him. He told us, the day before we went to the office, he really prayed hard for us. Praise God for this answered prayer! It strengthened Eduardo’s faith!
4) We spoke to the director and she was also very surprised that the smoothness of the entire process at the visa office. She herself, a non-Christian, told us – God really can do wonders! This is the second time she has experienced this with us.

We have an awesome God who is never late in answering our prayers! Now we have our visa valid till August 2012.

In the meantime, we have discovered a new permanent residential visa that we could try applying for. This requires us to notarize our certificates in Singapore and then come back to Ecuador to apply for it. ST and I are thinking of trying this out. Please pray along with us with wisdom and favor in the eyes of the authorities! Look forward to more testimonies! Amen!

In one of the afternoons, we had lunch with Claudia and Katty. We evaluated 2011 and started planning for 2012. We had a great time of fellowship too.

On another evening, we invited Angie to have dinner together. We cooked some typical Chinese food and Angie liked it very much, although it was spicy for her.

Peiru has a new hairstyle too as we went to have a haircut at Glenda’s hair salon. Below are some photos:

Paul Baloche leading with his electric guitar

Jiexian, Peiru and I are now in San Francisco, California attending Paul Baloche’s leadworship conference from 7-8 October. We just finished our day 1 with Paul Baloche in his concert. It was interesting seeing him doing soundcheck and sharing with us how he prepares before a P&W session. We had the chance to see him up, close and personal. He was sharing with us how it is so important to check the sound first as it will affect the heart and spirit. He also gave the illustration that it is like how we prepare and cook the fish, and it will affect how we feed and minister to the people through worship. We are looking forward to day 2 and learning more from him tomorrow.

We held a simple graduation ceremony after the church service to honour their hard work and encourage them to continue studying the rest of the course. There are altogether 5 trimesters to graduate from ISOM. All 5 of them have signed up for trimester 2 and they have started their classes this week.

The director of ISOM, Yessenia, came down to give out the certificates of graduation from trimester 1. Viviana was the chairperson for the graduation. Dario was unable to receive the certificate as he was away in another city to visit his parents.

Katty received the top student award as she had the highest points for all her homework, tests and exam. She received a special gift from Yessenia. After receiving their certificates and gift, we laid hands on them and prayed that they will be able to use their knowledge in the ministry.

If you are interested to read more about ISOM, you can click the link here: http://www.isom.org/

Below are some photos of the graduation ceremony:

Karen and Katty did a great job introducing the club and welcoming the people. Then we had great fun playing a communication game which got everybody warmed up to one another. After that, the people were distributed into 3 groups to learn and speak English. I took the intermediate group while Phoebe and Karen taught the beginners’ group.

The people really enjoyed the event and all of them signed up to become members of the club. Thank God for Karen who headed and led this project. We will comtinue to have this conversation club every Saturday afternoon. The idea is to learn English through the conversation classes, movies, songs and fun activities. Below are some photos of the launch event:

Dance 1

Dance 2