WE'RE BACK!

It's been a long time, more than a year, since I've written about our adventures in Ecuador. Most of you already know our youngest daughter became seriously ill last year, and without hesitation, I headed back to the US, South Carolina to be exact, to help care for her and our two precious grandchildren. Ken followed six weeks later because we expected our residency visa to be ready at any time. When it was obvious that wasn't going to happen he headed home too. Thankfully, Raelyn is doing wonderfully now, and even blessed us with another grandchild, Logan! Ecuador takes their immigration laws very seriously. Unlike the US, they work hard at preventing illegal aliens from flooding their country. In recent years, Columbians, Peruvians,Cubans and Chinese have been coming in droves. To crack down on this, every few months it seemed, new laws were added, and other laws changed, making it increasingly difficult to keep up and remain compliant. When we left Ecuador abruptly to help our daughter, we essentially made it impossible to return to Ecuador in less than a year without our residency visa. Our attorney, marginal when we were in country, became totally incompetent once we left. What should have been completed within a few months of our leaving took 14 months! Family and friends thought we were absolutely nuts for continuing to work through the problems. To the Ecuadorian government's credit, they have kept their standards high, yet have restructured the process so that attorneys are no longer required. This of course happened after we finally got our residency visa completed! They have even added bilinguil staff to assist the large number of Americans and Canadians looking for a better life in Ecuador. In September alone, there were 3000 English speaking visitors to Ecuador. Many believe this is directly related to the political situation in the US. Don't want to bore you with all the details. We had to fire our attorney, (no easy feat as she didn't want to be fired!), get a power of attorney to get her off the case and transfer authority to our newly hired facilitator, (no more lawyers for us!), and delay after delay until finally August 30th, our new visa was inserted into our passports and returned to us so we could return to Ecuador. Next step, getting our cedula!