PingYu Home of Hope

After a very long and drawn out process (starting way back in March of this year), I now have my drivers license, Praise Father! We thought that the trouble was over after the government finally approved my USA license, but oh were we wrong. “All” we had to do was sign up on line for me to take the test, but even when we tried signing up to take the test we had problems. One problem was the fact that my name translated into Chinese Characters was too long to fit in the spaces provided. Another problem was that my passport number is 9 digits not 18 like the Chinese passports. So the computer would not allow me to sign up. Michelle and I decided that I would just go and sit in their office until they signed me up to take the test. After bouncing back and forth between head leaders all morning long, they finally allowed me to take the test. The test is in Chinese Characters, which I can’t read but that is why I brought along Hank (who is the first child to come to the HOH). Hank and I were given another surprise when we saw that we had only 45 minutes to take a 100 question exam. After 25 minutes we still had 60 questions left. Poor Hank, he worked so hard to try to translate all the questions, the pressure of not knowing the driving laws and running out of time had to be tough on him. Then when there were 3 minutes left and we still had 20 questions left to go, Hank just started guessing at the answers. Well, sad to say we failed with a 65, you can only miss 10 to pass. We decided that we were not going to give up so we went looking for the head leader over all of the departments. He agreed that we should have had more time to be able to translate the questions, so he let us take it over again, which we passed on the second time…..Praise Father!
The next step was to go back to a city about an hour away to buy our van. So on the 24th,  Hai Tao (the HOH’s devoted driver), Hank and all of our family went van shopping. If you have ever experienced buying a car in the States, you can maybe understand a little bit of what we experienced…..except you need to add three very hyper boys who had nowhere to run off their energy. Pretty fun, I am thankful that I was blessed with an awesome wife. Michelle let me go look, deal and buy the van while she stayed in the van and waiting room with the boys.

We could not get the van we were planning on buying (the same van that both the HOH’s have) because China just made a new law that if you have more than 9 seats you need to pay more taxes and have a different license to be able to drive it. After the fight we had in getting the license we just got, we decided to just buy an 8 seat mini-van. The only thing unfortunate about buying the mini-van is that it cost us $2000.00 more than what we expected. The van is absolutely great. The boys were so excited they were bouncing off the ceiling…..literally, I did not know kids could bounce that hard off a van seat.
Now the only problem we face is learning how to drive here, it’s quite different than the States. The driving wheel is on the same side and we drive on the same side of the road…..well we are suppose to anyway. Let’s just say we have to be on guard 100% of the time when driving here and expect everyone to cut you off.
This has been such a learning experience for us. Yes we have learned how to deal with government officials more and how long it takes to buy something that cost a lot of money (we left our house at 7:30am and did not get home until 6pm). We have also learned not to have road rage!!!!! (Maybe I have not 100% learned it yet but I’m certainly trying.)

Jaxin working out on the exercise bike in the waiting room, Tyler playing on their Nintendo (thank you grandparents for this!)

Eli going crazy waiting for the van!

We wanted to share this great experience with all of you, and wanted to thank you for joining in with praying for me getting my license and for us purchasing our new van. We Praise Father for all He does and will do. Also just to let you all know that our van has plenty of room for luggage so if any of you want to come over for a visit, we are ready to pick you up.
Blessing to all of you
Ben, Michelle, Jaxin, Eli, Tyler and JAC (that’s the model and now the name of our van)