We have our visas!

It has been two and a half years since I (Michael) came back from my first trip to Angola. It was a scouting trip of sorts, some might call it a vision trip, to see if we should move to the remote city of Menongue to teach and do missions work as volunteers with Operation Mobilization. I stayed with Wessel and Joan van der Merwe, OM missionaries from South Africa who have been in Angola for two decades. Learn more about their ministry here. As many of you know, I was stranded in Angola for two extra weeks when the coronavirus hit. I finally made it out of the country with the help of the US Embassy and the HALO Trust, an organization dedicated to the eradication of landmines.

After returning from Angola, convinced that we were supposed to move there, my wife and I started pursuing our long-term visas, starting with our passport applications. Foreshadowing the long process that was to come, it took six months for the US to issue my new passport. My wife had hers in hand within two months. We hope to write a series of posts documenting our DIY approach to getting the visas. In case we don’t get that done, just know it was more difficult and took far longer than we expected. There have been blessings in the delays, however, including experiences that we would have missed if everything had gone according to our pre-conceived timeline. God’s timing is best.

A few days ago, all six of our one-year visas finally arrived, and we will be leaving the United States on November 9, 2022. The first leg of our journey will take us overnight across the Atlantic Ocean to Frankfurt, Germany, where we have a 12-hour layover. Another overnight flight will see us arriving in Luanda, Angola early the next morning. After a few hour’s rest in Luanda, we then have a 20-hour, 600-mile (1,000-kilometer) bus ride to look forward to (again overnight) to the city of Menongue. From leaving our home in the US on the 9th to arriving at our new home in Menongue on the 12th, over 60 hours will have passed.

As we worked on the visas (I say we, but my wife did most of the actual work), we prepared for our eventual move. We started identifying things that we could live without, and started giving away lots of stuff, including all of our furniture. We sold our primary residence over a year ago, because we didn’t want to deal with that stress right before leaving. We didn’t expect to still be in America near the end of 2022, so we have been living a somewhat nomadic lifestyle since selling our home. We have learned to embrace the idea that less is more, and we are thankful for that mindset as we pack away our remaining possessions for long storage. Our goal is to take as few storage bins/suitcases as possible to make travel easier and live as simply as possible in our new mud and tin-roof home.

I made a second trip to Angola in November of 2021 to be at my friend Ericleidy’s wedding to Delfina (both of whom I met on my first trip) and to take with me some of our belongings, including a small generator (blog post forthcoming on that trip).

I hope to teach both English and computer programming in Angola. I have a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificate and a master’s degree in computer science. I have been working at my software engineering job this whole time, and my last day will be in early November. One of my hobbies is photography, so I am looking forward to documenting our experiences in Angola in images and videos and posting them on this blog. And I am almost finished writing a memoir about my time in Angola during the early stages of the pandemic in 2020.

In terms of mission work, the OM team in Menongue has many outreaches. We have committed to an initial two-year term. During the first year, we will focus on language learning in Portuguese, learning the culture, and forging relationships. Over time, we will discover where we fit into the OM ministries, which include:

• Discipleship groups
• One-year mission training program for Angolan young adults
• Local church support
• Prison and hospital visitation
• Children’s clubs and camps
• An academic school for local children, grades 1-3, expanding each year up to grade 7
• Neighborhood visiting and witnessing
• Practical skills training, including English instruction

We still have much to do before we leave. We have a few medical checkups to take care of, including flu vaccinations and a couple of COVID shots. There are still a few more items to be purchased, and we have much sorting and packing to do. And of course, we have many friends and relatives that we would like to see before we go. We want to have all these things done soon, so that our final week in the US can be as relaxing and free of stress as possible.