Chmiels in Czeck Republic

In our last email update we wrote to you about our time in Ukraine. But the pictureis not from Ukraine. As some of you know we had to come to the Czech Republic (where our citizenship is) to take care of some paperwork – Miriam’s name was still Miriam Novotna on all her Czech documents, Tomasz needed a new passport, our Czech driver’s licenses are expiring soon etc. But we are also using this as an opportunity to spend a little bit of time with our families, visit the churches where we grew up, and reconnect with some of our friends.

But even though we are enjoying our time in Prague (Prague is beautiful! Come visit!!) and other parts of the Czech Republic, we are eager to be in Ukraine soon. We study Ukrainian every day and we hope to permanently move to L’viv at the end of next month. Please pray that God would clearly guide us in this move. We would, for example, like to buy some furniture for our new apartment in IKEA in Poland and we even have a guy who is willing to bring it for us to L’viv but we are still trying to figure out what exactly is the correct and legal way to do this. From what we know we should somehow be able to get the Polish taxes back in order to be able to pay the tax in Ukraine. But so far all we hear is that most people just pay something to the customs officers at the border and they let them go without doing it the “official way.” But we really want to do it the right way. We know there is a lot of corruption in Ukraine and we do not want to add to it in any way.

Another thing that you can pray for is our visa interview at the US embassy here in Prague on May 10 (Tomasz’s birthday ☺ ). As you probably remember we applied for our new US visa when we were still in the States but the case was pending and pending so this March we left for Europe without it. We need our US visa to be able to be employed by our American mission organization and also to be able to come back to the States on furloughs. So please pray that if it be God’s will that we would get this visa without any problems.

Thank you so much for all your prayers and your friendship!

Tomasz and Miriam