Riddle Family In Italy

Hand Made Quilt Raffle...

Part of what we have to do as missionaries is raise the funds that we need in order to work here in Italy.  We are not allowed to work for pay here in Italy with an Italian employer because that would be taking already scarce jobs from the Italians that need them.  So, we have to raise support from various sources in order to stay here to serve the church.  It is not our favorite part of missions to say the least.

We are now in the process of doing a quilt raffle in order to raise additional funds for our work here in Italy.  It is a beautiful quilt; hand made.  We will be selling tickets for it through October 5, 2008.  All of the funds raised will go into our account with Virginia Mennonite Missions. 

If you are interested in purchasing a chance to win this quilt, contact us through this blog by sending a comment or email us at riddle.family.in.italy@gmail.com

Tickets are priced as follows:

$1.00 - 1 Ticket;  $5.00 - 6 Tickets;  $10.00 - 15 Tickets;  $20.00 - 35 Tickets and $25.00 - 50 Tickets.

If there are those who would be interested in selling tickets to help us out, let us know that also.  We will take all the help we can get.  Like we said, fund raising is the least favorite part of being a missionary, but it is a necessary part.  The more people we have helping out, makes it that much easier on everyone.

The drawing for this quilt will be held on October 15, 2008.

We're Paying For What?!

We bought a car in January.  We went to do the paperwork to transfer the car to our name, but there was a problem.  Our "Permission to Stay" papers had expired!  Now, we had applied for new ones but we were in the process of waiting for our appointment to go finish the paperwork for them, so we were okay as far as being in the country, but we could not get the car registered completely in our name until we got the new "Permission".  So we filled out the temporary papers and the guy at that office said to bring the papers back when we received our "Permission".

Well, we waited.  The office we go to to get our "Permission" is notoriously slow.  They originally told us to return after May 2nd to pick up our "Permission".  We went around the middle of May and at that point we were told to come back at the end of June!!  With a busy schedule we were finally able to get back to the office the second week of July and after waiting for two hours in line, all of us there that day were told to go home because all of the computers were down!!  We finally received our "Permission" papers the following week.

So we gathered up our papers and took them back to the office to get the car registered.  We were told, "You have to pay 30 euro more because your papers expired.  You took to long to bring your "Permission" back to me.  I have to charge you this because it is the law and the 30 euro goes to the Government."  Welcome to Italy!

This is the only place on earth that I know that tells you that you have to have one document in order to get another and the fines you because you did not receive the first document from the government in time!!  We love the people here, but working with the government here in challenging sometimes to say the least.