Dear Friends,

Hello and thank you for keeping us in your prayers over the last few days.  We arrived safely in the States Tuesday afternoon but my email has not been working.  We had an interesting time getting here, but the Lord worked it all out.  Our journey back started with waiting at the airline ticket counter for over an hour as the new emergency passports we had did not all register in the computer network.  Eventually, they gave us our boarding passes, and then it was off to migration to get our passports stamped.  The migration officers in Bolivia did not want to let us leave on our emergency passports because we did not have our original entrance date into Bolivia stamped in the passports. He told us we needed a police report stating that our original passports were lost, but the U.S. Consulate said we did not need the report to get emergency passports.  So then he said he needed to see my original papers saying that our original passports were lost in the immigration department.  I explained that I did not have these with me. I had left them with a fellow missionary so he would be able to collect our passports for us, if they ever come back to immigration.  This whole time I had copies of my original passports with the entrance date, but the officer said that since they were not certified copies he could not accept them.  After about fifteen minutes of arguing with the officer, he finally said he would talk to his supervisor.  The supervisor asked to see my Bolivian ID card, asked a few questions and then told the officer to let me by.  I was very thankful that the supervisor over-ruled his then very unhappy subordinate.  After that the trip went much better.  We found out once we boarded the plane that the non-stop trip was not actually non-stop.