HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

Hi All

Just a quickie to wish everyone a very Happy Christmas and a Peaceful New Year.

I'm sure you are all busy getting everything sorted for tomorrow, we are just about ready here, we'll be heading for the airport around 7.00am and Christmas dinner will be what ever they throw at us on the plane!

The little drawing (left) arrived in the post today from my Tibetan foster daughter, Kundu Lhamo.

Kundu goes to a Tibetan school in Dharamasala, India. She is one of the lucky ones, her family managed to escape over the Himalayas to the safety of Indian, although she is growing up estranged from her home land and her family, she is getting a good education and will hopefully have a bright future.

It just seems sad that we will spend Christmas so close to Tibet yet she will most likely never set foot in her own country.

Poppy & Lu have left a Christmas video message for everyone on Poppy's blog, check it out www.poppysplanet.blogspot.com/

Happy Christmas

Carri x

WE GOT IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just had an email from the New Zealand immigration office, our business plan has been APPROVED and we're in, yay!!!!!!!!
Talk about efficient, it is less than three weeks since we submitted the application! Now we have to send our passports to the immigration office at the end of January to get our visas and permits stamped in them - that's about a week after we get back from Nepal. So we are going to land back in Singapore and have to arrange a container shipment from home, a container shipment from work, flights, sort out banking, bills, car, finish packing etc. Then the kids start school a week later and we have nowhere to live and a business to establish. Oh my God this is going to be super stressful - help!

Injections

Just been to have our Hepatitis A and Typhoid jabs, it would have been a quick and easy procedure had it not been for the children. They behaved like a pair of overgrown babies and both of them screamed the surgery down. It took so long to calm them that we ended up getting a parking ticket!

One thing I will miss about Singapore when we leave, is the health service. Everything is just so simple and straightforward. Almost every shopping area has a health centre, if you need to see a doctor you just walk in, there is no need to be registered or make an appointment. You do have to pay but it is often not much more than an average prescription charge in the UK, and the hospitals are just something else. Forget all notion of what you expect a hospital to be, you would swear that you were in a five star hotel. Vast reception areas with lavish marble floors and columns, huge floral displays and uniformed doormen, the hospital we go to near work, Raffles International, even has a grand piano in the entrance area! don't ask me why, it is bizarre. My favorite is the women's hospital, the car park is painted bubblegum pink and all of the nursing staff wear pink uniforms, it's like a toy hospital, you half expect doctor 'Barbie' to come and examine you!
In Singapore there are two national obsessions, shopping & eating, and they don't let a trivial thing like a life threatening illness get in the way! Most of the hospitals have a shopping mall and a varied selection of restaurants on site. The hilarious thing is that in the restaurant area there is invariably a branch of MacDonald's, in a hospital!! still I guess it's good for business :)

Carri x

Christmas in the Himalayas

Firstly, apologies to everyone for my lack of emails, I have been so bad at keeping in touch lately. With all the turmoil here with the immigration applications I am afraid everything else has been taking a back seat.
We got a letter earlier this week from New Zealand immigration just letting us know that they had processed the application and requesting copies of mine & Steve's birth certificates. We are just about to go to the solicitors and get those certified so we can forward them to Wellington. They reckon that the application will be allocated to a case officer in 2-4 weeks, so it is going to be mid January before anybody even looks at it.

We have spent the last few weeks just going round in circles trying to decide what to do next, do we go to New Zealand and wait for the outcome there or do we hang on in Singapore. Staying here is the most logical choice but with nearly everything packed in boxes now and all the furniture wrapped for shipping it is pretty depressing. So in our usual impulsive manner we have decided to do neither and we are heading for Nepal instead!

We fly to Kathmandu at 9.00am Christmas morning, we will be coming back sometime late January. Our outward luggage allowance will be mostly taken up by boxes of clothing and toys that we are taking to one of the many orphanages out there. This is all stuff that the kids have grown out of in the four years we have been out here, it seems such a shame to throw it all out when there are children so badly in need. Before you all think that I have turned into Mother Theresa, I have to admit to an ulterior motive - travelling out to Nepal for nearly a month with no clothes means that I have to buy them while I'm there!!!! and as it is Nepal I will be in my scruffy element :)

I was a little concerned as to how our kids would react to 'giving up' Christmas, we have not been able to decorate the house this year as everything is packed and we don't have a clue where! Christmas presents have been restricted to one or two tiny gifts that can be carried in hand luggage, and now Christmas Day will be spent in transit. However I am really proud of them, they have taken it all in their stride and are really fired up by the idea of giving rather than getting.

There are a few other things that we plan to do while we are there, as well as all the obvious tourist stuff and the amazing photographic opportunities, it will also be a chance to visit Kopan Monastery which is the heart of the FPMT, founded by our beloved Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa (Follow the links if you are interested) Also earlier this year we started working with a factory in Kathmandu that is producing the most gorgeous corsetry for us, so it will also be a chance to meet them in person and check out the working conditions in the factory.

So now we've got stacks to do before we go, it's back to the hospital for a load of injections, I don't even know if we need a visa for Nepal, better get on with some research! I promise I will be in touch with everyone before we leave.

Namaste

Carri x

Lama Yeshe - Portrait available from http://www.heartofthemoon.com/

Lama Zopa - Singapore 2007 - Taken by Carri

Its Gone!!!

At long last! we have actually submitted our LTBV (long term business visa) application. I just can't believe what a long, stressful and expensive task it has been. We hold business visas for Thailand and Singapore so it is not like we are new to the process, but the New Zealand one is so tough.
We have twelve years business experience behind us and two established limited companies and we still found this application really challenging! I guess that New Zealand immigration are just really trying to weed out the time wasters at the offset (however I think the thousand pound application fee successfully does that!!!)
On top of the application fee we have had to have a financial forecast prepared by a New Zealand accountant and all of our supporting documentation certified by lawyers here in Singapore, so it is certainly not a cheap or easy route in.

Anyway it has gone and the waiting game begins, they reckon it will be three to six months before we get an answer so we are living in limbo till then!

We have made good progress with the packing but have still not decided whenever to take a chance on shipping all of our personal stuff to New Zealand and risk having to ship it back again if the visa is turned down. It is most likely that we will ship the stuff over though, because even with shipping costs and having to pay the tax on everything when it goes in, it will still be cheaper than storing it in land scarce Singapore, and at least we will have access to everything, I must admit the prospect of living out of a suitcase for six months is not appealing!

It would be so much easier to just to stay in Singapore and wait for the outcome, but if we do that then the kids will miss the start of the new school term, and as they have not been to school for six months already we don't want to keep them out much longer.

We have managed to keep on top of the home edding and I think they have really benefited from it in some areas, maths and science especially, six months of one to one learning has brought them on leaps and bounds in these subjects.
English, surprisingly has proved to be much harder to teach at home. They are both extremely proficient in grammar but Poppy seriously struggles with creative writing while Lu is the opposite, she is extremely gifted and is determined to become an author. So I have trouble helping them both but for different reasons and there is very little outside help available here, Singapore so desperately needs to enlist more English, English teachers!

Please excuse me if I am not in touch with anyone for a few weeks, after spending so long on this visa application my work has seriously slipped and it is going to take me a while to catch up on things, will be in touch soon.

Carri x

Overdue Update

Sorry everyone, this is a long overdue update. Things are just so stressful here at the moment, progress is slow but we are starting to get somewhere at last.

The children have been officially offered places at Nelson Intermediate school and we have enrolled them for a term as international students. We submitted their student visa applications earlier this week and the immigration office has been in touch with us today with a query about their birth certificates, hopefully we should get that ironed out tomorrow and the application will go through smoothly.

The big issue now is whenever we are going to have to apply for an interim Guardian visa. Our business plan and business visa application is just about ready to submit but we can't send it in till I have my new passport, that won't be until the 19th. Once the business plan is in, it can take three to six months to be approved, but the new school term starts the first week of February, it is unlikely that we will have our visas by then and until we have work permits we can't enroll the kids as domestic students, that is why we have had to pay the fees and get them in as 'international'.

The children are not allowed to study in New Zealand without a parent or Guardian present, so it is possible that we will have to apply for a Guardian visa to cover us until our business visa is approved. That is IF it's approved! we are confident that our business plan is a very sound one, but you never know do you - and that is where the big stress is coming from because we just can't plan anything until we get that official 'yes' We daren't take a chance on shipping all our stuff over there until we get that visa because if we don't get it, we'll be shipping it all back again! on top of that, without the visa we will have to pay tax on everything we own going in.

These are all issues that we can get around, the thing that is causing us real problems right now is the fact that it is summer in NZ and peak holiday season, Nelson is one of the top tourist spots in New Zealand and finding any accommodation there at this time of year is proving to be truly impossible. We can't take on a long term unfurnished property because we can't ship our stuff over and all short term furnished accommodation is fully booked up or astronomically expensive.

When we have visited New Zealand in the past we have stayed in a hotel for few days to get over the flight, then hired a camper van and headed off. It is a fabulous way to see the country and we all love living on the road. So we have even looked at the possibility of living in a camper until we can find something more permanent, but again most of the vans are booked up and the only ones available are way over priced.
We are currently toying with the idea of buying our own camper van as soon as we arrive, that way we will have somewhere to live and transport all in one! it is a crazy idea but it may be our only option.

UPDATE - Just been down to the immigration office and the kids have had their student visas approved and stamped into their passports. We don't need to apply for a Guardian visa as they have only given the girls permits until May, but that will be long enough for us to find out whenever our business plan will be approved or not.

Carri x

Halloween

Just some pics from yesterdays Halloween fancy dress do, Poppy is a Rag Doll and Lucinda is - just Lucinda!

Stress levels here are running really high at the moment, we are drowing in forms and red tape, will post a big update after the weekend - Catch you all soon

Carri x