Our Red Thread to China

On 13 October 2005, we went to orientation at our agency, CCAI. Actually, the orientation was officially on 8 October, but my wife and I are Seventh-day Adventists, and we weren’t comfortable with attending the orientation that day. Because of that, and because we had things to do at church that day, we asked them if we could handle the orientations another day or another way. The CCAI office here in Georgia was very helpful and agreed to orient us the next Thursday.

We had gathered some documents together to bring with us, things like a floor plan of our house and copies of our passports. Most of the things we already had, and we just needed to make copies of them. Fortunately, we’d recently bought a multi-function office machine, so making copies was as easy as moving our cat Elsa off it. That’s not as easy as it sounds, because our cat really likes sleeping on it, but we managed. (In the picture, we’ve covered the multi-purpose machine so it won’t get completely clogged by cat hair.)

The people working in our agency let us know more about the process and what we need to be doing. When we left, we had our marching orders, and it was time to get busy.

In the next episode, the bewildered explorers are lost in a paperwork jungle….