#10 - Closed doors, open windows (1)
This part of our story is a little lengthier and harder to make fun with pictures. That's why I cut it into two parts.
The first options ...
As soon as we came back from our trial trip, the great preparation started. We spent quite the number of hours on the internet to figure out what the best possibilities would be for us. Eventually, we came to three options, that all looked pretty promising.
Thee Religious Worker Greencard/visa. This is a visa for people that come to work/volunteer for an American religious institution. We seemed to check all the eligibility-boxed, so we were very excited about this one.
The Diversity Lottery Program. Every year, America releases 50.000 Green Cards through a lottery. We could enroll for the program and 6 months later we'd hear if we were selected. The odds were not in our favor, but it was free and without any risks, so we went for it.
AIA USA / CRU USA. I'd been working with Agape Netherlands for a couple of years and was part of their movement Athletes in Action (AIA for short). AIA Netherlands was the founder of a cool concept called Church Sports Ministry (CSM), in which churches are helped to set up sports communities out of their church. These communities were meant to reach non-believers and train believers to reach them. Both Agape and AIA are part of a worldwide organization called CRU and AIA Global. The latter had been busy to use the Dutch CSM concept around the world. The project had been succesfully started in countries like Brasil and Libanon, but not in the States yet. My team and I saw this as a great possibility for me to set up CSM at the Road Church, putting CSM on the map in the States too.
Unfortunately ...
all these options fell through. President Trump shut the Religious Worker Program down. We weren't selected at the lottery. And even though every one of AIA Global was excited and interested in our idea, AIA USA wasn't that interested at all. Especially those first two options really bummed Ramon and me out. Even though not having a green card in America doesn't necessarily mean you can't make any money legally, it does mean you need to show proof of funds when applying for your visa. We needed to be able to proof that we had enough funds for 2 years. That was a lot of funds we needed, especially missionary funded, especially in an expensive country like America. Back to the drawing boards for us: What visa was available for us, that we could use?
We were a bit stuck ...
Especially since we needed almost €100.000 to pay for a 2-year stay in the US. Buying healthy food is incredibly expensive, so is housing (at least €1100 p.m) and expat health care (about €800 p.m). So Ramon and I did what we do best: think outside the box: what else could we do to make sure we needed less money? We came to the following idea:
We'll go for an initial 8 months, go back home for 3 months and then return to Pennsylvania for another 4 months. That way we can remain Dutch citizens, with the right of Dutch Health care (and it's prices) That would easily save us up to €650 p.m. It would mean we could only go for a total of a year, but it would always be possible to evaluate and then maybe go again.