Bittersweet day

It was a difficult afternoon today in Anse-a-Pitre. Last night at the meeting I found out that the border has become increasingly difficult to pass so the brothers were going to write a letter to the Dominican side requesting permission for us to continue to pass back and forth for preaching They has been allowing us to cross, but because of the difficulties for others the brothers wanted to make sure we had legit permission to cross in case anything more happened. This morning we normally would have gone over the border but the brothers wanted to wait for the letter to be processed and to receive an official response. Not going over this morning already bummed me out as I have not been there for almost 3 weeks and I had so many people I wanted to visit!
In any case, Jonas said we should be able to cross this afternoon so Verity, Valerie, and I met him at the border at 3pm. The guard at the gate saw us coming and automatically opened up the fence to allow us through. But before we went Jonas had to go and check in the status of our letter. He came back with bad news. They had not authorized the letter and were not going to allow us to continue to to cross freely as before. Thankfully, they did say they would allow us to cross this afternoon so we could let all of our visits (or as many as we could get to) know about us not being able to cross in the future and, too, about them not being able to come to the meetings in Pedernales. The brothers had seen this coming though, and had already arranged for a small meeting to take place in Anse-a-Pitre this sunday. I don't know if it will be a continuous thing or not, but at least we had some bit of good news to tell our visits.
Jonas stayed positive and remarked, as we all were crossing the bridge, "this is today. we don't know what will happen tomorrow!"
It was very hard afternoon. Not only because, combined, we had so many visits we could not possibly get to all of them, (plus we were also trying to visit other peoples visits if we knew them), but also it was just so hard to have to tell so many wonderful people that this might be the last time we would see them for awhile. All of us had sad faces and we had some really strong hugs of goodbyes. A lot of my visits, when they saw me, ran up to me with huge smiles on their faces, glad to have me back. Which just made it harder to have to tell them that I didn't know if or when I would be able to come again. I mean, I knew I would eventually have to say goodbye to all of them when I leave, but this was all just unexpected and too soon. 
I really hope that before I leave they will allow us to cross again!