Residency for Raia

While we've been here in Ivano-Frankivsk, we've had a lot of details to work on, things we couldn't do anything about under occupation. One of those is getting residency for Raia. She'll turn 18 in less than a month. We had kind of decided that we wouldn't do anything about Ukrainian documents for her, since she's planning to be in Lithuania at college most of the time soon. She could legally be in Ukraine with her passport 90 days at a time, and that seemed like enough. But, really, it would be better for her to have residency, so we're slowly moving forward with that.

When we did this for Jaan, I wrote a quick summary of the process. That was back when everything was simple. Now, that first step is very daunting. The first document needed--there could be quite a few subpoints under that first point--is a request from the inviting organization to the local religion and culture office for them to approve the invitation of a foreign citizen. Okay. But there's no religion and culture office in Kherson now. There's also no migration service or passport office, and everyone we used to work with on all this is gone. Can the Kherson war administration do approvals? Will went around to offices here yesterday (and several other times in the past few weeks), and honestly, no one really knows what to do. We have some leads, and we'll keep looking. Please pray for us.