UPDATE on our travel home and housing situations

Before I update you on our lives here I need to say two things. First, thank you to everyone who wrote us and sent us their love and encouragement. It meant a lot to us and was a healthy reminder that we have many people who love us and are standing with us. We are thankful for all of you. Secondly, I’m sorry that it’s been a few days without an update, but literally each day our situation has been changing.

Our apartment. So after we found out that we might need to move in the next month we were pretty unsure of how to act. On one hand we wanted to start getting our situation resolved, but on the other hand there was hope we could stay here and we didn’t want to give up on that. Our landlord was supposed to be getting back to us in two weeks when she returned to Xian. We felt though that we needed to know what to expect before then, so we had our friend call to see if our landlord could extend our current lease until we got back here in November (or so). And we’re relieved to report that she agreed to let us extend our lease! This is a great short-term solution and takes a lot of stress off us for the moment. Of course when we get back we will need to find another solution if she still wants to sell our apartment, but we will cross that bridge when we get to it.

This leads to some more news on our plans to travel home. Originally we were gonna have Heather traveling home March 23rd with Aubrey then Sydney and I catching up with them a couple weeks later. If you remember this was because I (Matt) felt with the apartment situation up in the air and other logistical things to take care of, that I would need more time. Well since our apartment situation is now resolved and because we realized it might not be the best situation for Heather to travel alone with Aubrey, we will now all be traveling home on the 23rd. We’re so excited to be going home together! (Thank you Chris for helping us get tickets home together)

In only a few short days we’ve seen both of these situations become a lot less stressful and we are incredibly grateful. (We also had someone ask about renting our apartment while we’re in the States, which would be awesome!)

Thank you again everyone, we love you!

the petersons