10 Aug

First an update about Wauzi – things have been quite in our area for the past two weeks so I hope that these criminals have realized that we are too awake for them and have taken their evil elsewhere. Wauzi has fully recovered and is running around as normal.

Now onto the good stuff :

We have had an offer on our house at R10 000 less than what we originally wanted for it, so we have accepted the offer. We are now waiting for the agent to come around so that we can sign the offer. Because of the long weekend, I presume it will only happen next week.

We then drove to Pretoria yesterday for our long awaited interview with NZIS at the IOM. Our case officer was Adelle Curtis. She is a lovely lady and we immediately felt at ease. She obviously asked most of the questions on the checklist, so we were pretty well prepared, but let the answers flow naturally. If we forgot to say something we just left it at that. The interview was very informal with her asking a question, then we would basically have a chat between the three of us. When she was happy that we had answered her question, she would pause to type a summary into her laptop.

We were probably about half way through the interview when Adelle suddenly blurted out – with me in mid-sentence – “You have your All Black shirt on!!!” with a huge smile on her face. Boy, I had long forgotten that I was even wearing my AB shirt, she caught me so by surprise that I could feel myself turning blood red. All I could get out was : “Of course, why would I not have my AB shirt on”. I am sure she had a good giggle at my expense afterwards because of the stupid look that must have been on my face.

The interview took just under an hour and although you could never call any interview a breeze, we did feel that it went well and Adelle said it was unlikely that we would be turned down at this point, it was just a case of deciding whether we would be granted a Work To Residence or full PR. We are obviously over the moon and are now holding thumbs that they are happy that we have done our homework and can grant us full PR immediately. But if they grant us WTR, that is great, it will just mean that we will have to wait for full PR until after I have been working for three months.

Her estimate was that we should have an answer by end of September – we can’t wait, but have so much to do now, that I’m sure the time is gonna fly past……

SOON WE WILL BE KIWIS