Stamped

The kids' passport photo extras where taken last spring in Florida, late in the day, after hours of swimming in the sun.  They were told not to smile.  These look like mugshots, and Oakes looks like a candidate for his third straight foster home.

Apostille!

Application is pending approval...

~~~

"Copias, copias, copias… necissite copias?"  

A familiar diminutive man sporting a floppy hat, argyle sweater, windbreaker, and a scarf coiled tightly around his neck makes a familiar pitch while sauntering down the line, hands shoved into his pockets, shoulders hunched.  The sun is just coming up over the office buildings.  The traffic builds slowly, beginning with busses and cabs.

"No thanks -- I was here Friday.  I think I have everything I need this time."   We exchange a few more words.  I tell him that this was my sixth trip to this building.  He nods sagely; he is not surprised.

"That's the way it is.  One trip, and another and another, and so on."  He shrugs and, having already surveyed the newcomers at the back, wanders up towards the head of the line.  The candy/cigarette lady shows up with her box of goodies.  She sets it on a plastic chair that has materialized somehow and arranges the cigarettes (with ultra-graphic cancer photos on the front), so that she can sell singles from the various packs.  More people glom onto the line which extends down the sidewalk about half a block.   

A woman in front of me wearing blanket like a poncho shivers audibly.  Turns out, she's a professional line-holder.  "Fria, fria, fria…"   (Cold, cold, cold.)  The temps linger in the upper 40s/low 50s.  I've worn a long-sleeved shirt and a wool shirt; I've been here before.  Still fresh out of VT, I haven't felt real cold for awhile.

Finally the coffee/sandwich lady comes up the walk, a plastic bag full of thermoses and sandwiches dangling from each hand.  Right on time -- yes!  

"Cafe, Chocolate, Aguacitas, sanduches…"  

"Cafecito, por favor!"  She heads over, sets her bags down, pulls a blue thermos out and stack of clear plastic cups, and pours off a delicious cup of instant super sugar-dosed coffee.  (This is no time for coffee snobbery.)

Germans, French, Columbians, Peruvians, North Americans, and the occasional lawyer -- by 6:30 there are maybe thirty or forty of us waiting outside of the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores in downtown Quito, Ecuador.  Most of its two million residents are just waking up, but not this little pocket of society on Avenida 10 de Agosto, the main vein through this ten-plus mile long city.  Sixteen miles south of the equator, it's still cold in the early morning at 9,000-plus feet of elevation.    

When the folder girl cruises up, things are really starting to swing out here on the sidewalk.  They really love their folders here -- legal size, with the built-in two-hole binder.  Color doesn't seem to matter, but I may be wrong.  The government does not supply folders -- maybe that's why they're not up to their necks in debt with China.   

There is a whole cottage industry that centers on extranjeros (foreigners) needing visas.  Besides the line-holders, you can find all kinds of entrepreneurs within a one block walk: a copy store, the passport photo guys, cash machines, and an assorted variety of law offices.  Then there are the street vendors, several of whom somehow have portable copiers with pirated electricity from three strung-out extension cables.  So it's not crazy to see someone selling sodas, chips, gum, lollipops , and copies on this block.

By 7 the back door of the Ministerio opens and the line lurches forward.  A security guy comes out and starts rolling up the metal doors one at a time.  The line snakes inside to a holding area were the men frisked by the ubiquitous security detail.  There must be a dozen different private firms operating and subcontracting in northern Ecuador, each with its own uniform.  Regardless, they always wear ties under big flak-jackets.  Guns range from holstered .45s to back-strapped sawed-off shotguns, but they don't have guns in the federal building.  In Quito, there are women security guards.  The fact that the National Police may (or may not) have attempted a coup (going so far as to hold the president essentially under house-arrest) nearly two years ago to the day may account for the private contractors in a federal office -- though I am only speculating.  After a cursory check of the bags, I am free to head to the chairs in the next stage of this purgatory.  I sit in the visa section, one of several sections where people a lined up in chairs in the order that they entered the building.

By 7:30, we are ushered up to the all powerful Info Desk ten people at a time.  There, if we are judged worthy (by our folders full of documents), we are given a number.  (Three times before, I'd failed to make it past this desk.) Though I am twentieth or so in line, because there are so many different types of requests, windows, agents, and visas, I am number V1 for the tourist visa line.  I may now go to the "first floor" -- which in Ecuador is always the second floor -- and wait until 8:30 when the first visa agents show up.  

Eventually, the room will fill with people from all over the place -- South America, Europe, Asia -- all looking for visas.  There is a big screen up front that tells us what number is up.  The numbers tick off at a glacial pace.  I am sure that some insects run a full life-cycle within two or three numbers.  For our edification, there is a Ministeio de Relaciones promo-video, exactly 45 seconds long, that plays ad infinitum.  (Cue the jovial farmers shaking hands in front of Cotopaxi scene.)  Sometimes the guards let older folks or folks with young kids go ahead.  Sometimes people return with a missing document, and they are let through.  And sometimes people use the back door.  They've been here before, too -- they know how to work it.  Sometimes they bring gifts for the guard at the door.  These people always know the guard by name; they usually have law degrees.  

~~~

Unless you've run this gauntlet before, you cannot really appreciate what it takes to get to this level.  The first time we came, we were too late; there would be no more visas for that day.  But the first time  I made it to the first floor/second level, I had number V87.  Late again, I waited from 9:30 until 2:30 for my five minute audience with Jimmy.  (I've had Jimmy twice, out of three visits to this level; we're bros now.)   People who know me know that I am not exactly the most patient person in the world, but I waited it out, admirably I'd like to think.  Waited for my five minutes to be told that my original documents (in this case, the kids' birth certificates and our marriage license -- the originals mind you) needed the official apostille stamp.  Against my will, I now am intimately familiar with the apostille stamp.  

Penned by the Hague Conference on Private International Law (established in 1883 in case you were wondering), the Apostille Treaty lays out the circumstances and manners by which a legal piece of paper issued in one country can be legit in another country, assuming both countries have signed the old treaty.  As it happens, both the US and Ecuador have.  Basically, it's an international notary stamp, a really fancy gold one.  (More on notaries tout suite.)

Anywho… I'd been to the same office on Friday, had all of my paperwork approved (a Herculean achievement in and of itself), and was ready to get the gold stamp when I was told, "OK you can bring out your family now.   We need them for pictures."  But the family was blissfully un-beuracratified in Otavalo, ignorant of this latest twist in the labyrinth.  So, we'd come back to Quito on Sunday, got a family-sized room at a hostel within walking distance of the Ministerio, which brings us up to speed with number V1, Monday morning 8:30, all good to go.

If I may, however, I would like to digress here for a moment.  Please pardon the GenX pop culture reference, but this whole experience is a lot like Donkey Kong: you start at level one, jumping barrels and climbing ladders on a random construction site, trying to get to the top where the big monkey holds the girl captive.  And when you get to the top, Donkey Kong beats his chest and grrrrs, then takes her up another level.  The only way you improve -- i.e. ascend more and more levels -- is through experience, trial and error.  

Sitting there in the waiting room on the first (or second depending on how you count) floor of the Ministerio with number V1, I had made it to the Pie Level.  This is Donkey Kong again -- you know what I'm talking about if you spent more than 50 bucks on it in 1985 (maybe at Godfather's Pizza, maybe playing a little Galaga intermittently).  You have to beat a bunch of the same construction scene levels, each progressively harder, until, finally, you come out on the Pie Level.  At last the Pie Level!  Here for some reason there are pies, which shoot down conveyor belts, which you/Mario have to jump over or they kill you.  Not exactly logical, but neither is Ecuadorian bureaucracy.  

  

So here I am, 8:15, fifteen minutes more to see Jimmy, and everything is in place.  The kids and Kerry, having slept and had breakfast, are on their way.  All the documents are there in my folder: My application with 4 official, color, passport-sized photos of the four of us affixed; my official letter of request for visa 12 IX stating my purpose for being in Ecuador (in Spanish, thank you, Google Translate); our faux itinerary for leaving (thank you, Jackie Lucia of Childs Travel); our notarized color photocopies of our passports (thank you Otavalo Notary lawyer who just signs the document without looking and takes my five bucks); our bank letter and its translation, both notarized, stating that yes, we are financially solvent and won't be panhandling on the PanAmerican Highway (thank you again, Otavalo Notary Lawyer); and finally, our official aposille-stamped, straight from VT via FedEx (3 days late, no thanks to you FedEx, but bless you a thousand times Saint Kathy Watters in the VT Dept of Archives and Records who shot our documents off) birth certificates and marriage license.  Yes, everything is in place for this, my sixth trip to the Ministerio.  Kerry and the kids show up.  Our number is called before they go too crazy -- so far so good -- and finally, we are called up to Jimmy's booth at a respectable 8:55.

But Jimmy was going to stuff us.  Like a 5' 5" U.S. Grant Middle School forward driving to the hoop against 7' Hakeem Olajuwon, he was going to smack that ball right back in our faces.  He would do it in a rather pleasant way though.  

"Soooo, this looks good… but are the translations for your apostille documents?"  

~~~

This sinking feeling was familiar.  Twice before I'd sat in this chair, hoping my 'folio would pass muster.  Kerry had read that there was a new rule: you could have apostille documents in English.  Kerry was ready to jump over the desk and rip is jugular out with her teeth.  In an odd role-reversal, I was the calm deliberate one.  We were going with that argument for a awile, but this was Jimmy's lane; he wasn't having any of it.  His word -- as far as we were concerned -- was law enough.  He told us that the translation would need, of course, to be notarized.

In retrospect my experience with notary guys in Otavalo was comparatively mellow -- I had translated our bank letter myself, with the help of Google translate.  When I took it into be notarized, the woman with the stamp asked me what it was.  I then proceeded to ramble on expressively, with plenty of gesticulating to my letter and the hypothetical US, in barely intelligible Spanish.  After a minute or two, I am fairly sure she just stamped the document to get me out of her cubicle.  I then took it across the office, waited for another minute before the lawyer -- engaged in pouring over documents with a couple -- motioned me over.  I told him briefly that this (showing him my Google trans doc) was a translation of (showing the English which he wouldn't understand).  He looked at the docs, looked at me, and then signed them without a question.  I paid him $3 for the signature, which went into his desk.  He went back to the couple without missing a beat.  Bade me adios without looking up.

If the Otavalo notary was a small filling, the Quito notary experience was a mouthful of root-canals… without novocain… and then being forced to eat a bowlful of glass shards.  If I thought this office would be like sleepy Otavalo, I had another thing coming.  But first we needed the translations.

Thinking that I could get away with a quick stop in an internet cafe (there's at least one every two or three blocks wherever you walk), I did the translations of the cover-pages, again, with the help of Google translate and printed them up.  We finally found the office of the Notary, Notario Octavio, conveniently located 10 blocks away fron the ministerio on, as it happens, Jorge Washington Ave.   After some deliberation about who should sign the thing, we decided it didn't matter, and I put our landlord's name on it, figuring he wouldn't mind.  At Notario Octavio, though, they were not buying it anymore than a four-year old's lie.  But we were given another clue for our hassle: a business card for an official translator.  A business card with a non-functioning phone number.

It took an hour, but we found the translator… right across the street from the same building we'd left a couple of hours earlier.  After a brief bout of despair, I'd remembered to insert the new extra 9 in cell-phone numbers that was just recently added.  So we tracked down the official Ministerio de Relaciones translator Maria Luisa Davalos, and pled our case.

"OK, I can do it," she said.  We exhaled. "Can you come in tomorrow?"  I was starting to feel a little like Wile E. Coyote.  There were more acts to come.

But Maria Luisa Davalos did indeed have a heart.  We explained our plight (if she'd heard it before, she didn't let on), and she told us to come back at 1:30.  It was now 11:30.  We said we could do that.  

After walking the 6 or so blocks to El Ejido Park, we started killing time again.  At least the kids could go nuts on some awesome slides.  Random detail: Kerry ripped her one and only pair of best-favorite jeans on the hoopty-ass teeter-totter.

~~

By 1:30 I was back at Maria Luisa Davalos' office.  I am guessing that she is German or Swiss, and hence when she said 1:30, she was more likely than the average Ecuadorian to be ready at 1:30.  I'd gone to the desk, said "hello again," signed in, traded my passport for a visitors' pass suspended by a lanyard (the actual wearing of which is mandatory before passing security), and retraced my steps to the third (fourth) floor.  She was just finishing up; I tried to calm my breathing.  I paid $10 per page, including the apostille cover translations, which only varied in numbers, 60 bucks total.  Each was stamped with her seal.  (Seal-making businesses abound here as well.)  No cashier was necessary; I paid the money directly to her.

And now on to the notary!  Notario Octavio, the only Notary that accepted Maria Luisa Davalos' stamp, so I hear.  Which would be why they gave us her card, I reckon.  I got to the office (for the second time) just before 2:00.  Which is lunch-time.  Of course.  I waited patiently outside the gated door.  Someone left after half an hour.  I peered in.  Apparently some people hadn't left the waiting chairs for who-knows-how long.

"Si Senor?"

"Mis blah blah blah tracuccion bla bla bla original blah blah blah notaria, por favor…"  

"You can come back at 3:30."  But… but...  Seriously?  I politely asked why.

"The lawyer is at lunch until then."

~~~

Meanwhile, at the park.  The kids where having a grand old time on the slides and swings.  The plan was for Kerry to eventually make her way back to the Ministerio via sidewalk, through two-million people bustling through their busy Monday.  No more than eight blocks away, on Jorge Washington Ave, I got huge bowl of rooster-leg soup and then went back to the notary office, thus entering into another dimension altogether. 

~~~

Like a demented yogi sitting lotus-style on a bed of hot coals, I let the excruciating pain take me to another place.    I would rather be back in that hospital bed in Olean (pronounced Oh-Lee-Ann), NY having my cornea scraped with a rough tool and then having liters of saline poured on my open eyeball while I hung upside down for six hours.  At least at the notary office I had my book, a look into a 9/11 hijacker's head while he patronized a strip club where the heroine's four-year old daughter who was supposed to be asleep was actually looking for her mother while she happened to be in "the Champagne Room" with the prospective hijacker posing as a high-roller.  Really uplifting stuff.  I shut the book after twenty minutes.  At least I could mutter obscenities with a reasonable degree of confidence that they would not be understood.

The scene in the Notario Octavio essentially represents my worst nightmare: The room was more like a hallway, with a row of seats opposite, in this order from left to right, a cashier (always, always a separate trip here, whether government office or hardware store), a secretary's desk (???), a copy room littered with Notario Octavio folder stuffed into boxes and on shelves from floor to ceiling, and then three offices, maybe four extended into the back lawyer's den.  When I came back to the office at 3:00, there were only a few people waiting.  By the time I left at 4:45, the place was packed to capacity like a bag of raisins left in your back pocket.   There was barely anywhere to move.  I had my brief case/bag and a backpack full of the kids, Kerry, and my dirty clothes from yesterday.

Unlike the fairly predictable Ministerio DLRE, there was no priority here, no way at all to tell who was next and when your stuff would possibly be ready.  No fewer than three, sometimes four non-distinct lines intertwined, so that it was impossible to tell whether or not, for example, one was waiting for the "secretary" or the woman in the copy/stamp room.  One line extended well into the equally narrow hallway.  People were butting in like crazy, especially the lawyers.  The four or five "assistants" wore flight attendant suits, were extremely calm and professional and efficient, and every time one of them elbowed her way through the crowds (quite professionally I must say), one of the suit guys would accost her with questions.  It was hot.  My wife thinks that I am slightly claustrophobic.  There was a really bad Spanish soap opera on the TV.  I'm pretty sure one man had been there for days.  I was ready to throw some elbows.

~~~

And by this time, Kerry had taken up a position back at the Ministerio.  Turns out that they stop seeing visa issues at 3.  Yet Kerry -- this is just what I imagine -- had laid five guards out with kung-fu kicks and chops and charged for the first/second floor office where, after she grabbed him by the tie and threatened to choke him with it, made Jimmy write a note saying that I should be let up the stairs when I arrived.  All with two children in tow.

~~~  

My phone rings.  It's Kerry.  She tells me that Jimmy will see me, that we can come up at any time before five.  Just call, and she'll come down with the permission slip she made him write.  I just need to make it by 4, before the cashier on the ground/first floor closes for the day.

~~~

There is no movement at 3:30, 3:45, 4:00... I call Kerry.  Tell her I'm still waiting.  I tell one of the flight attendants that my family is waiting, has been for hours, back at the Ministerio.  She is not moved.  At last some luck: they've switched the TV to a Japanese obstacle course where contestants hurt themselves in funny ways.  The mood is lighter.  People chuckle at other people's misfortune.  I'm finally handed a slip that I'm supposed to take the cashier.  The cashier's line is 7 people deep -- why oh why does it move so slowly?

When I make it up to the window (a couple dozen Japanese contestants have been crushed by papier-mache boulders and fallen face-first into moats by now), I push my slip to the lady behind the glass.  I hear her say "dos", and push a five through the slot.

"No, THIRTY-two" she says...

"Seriously?"  Several people laugh quietly behind me, whether in sympathy or at my naiveté, I am not sure.  The cashier takes my two twenties.

"You don't have anything smaller?"

"Seriously?"  There are two ladies in the booth, and now I see that the second woman's function is to dig for change in her purse to cover the office.  It's now 4:45, and whether I can make it back to Jimmy before 5 is a question.  I call Kerry.  Tell her I'm still waiting for the documents.  Finally, I see them on the "secretary's" desk.  I think about grabbing them.  None of the flight attendants has come out of the recesses for days it seems.  It's even hotter.  I take the documents.  I press back as far as I can.  I contemplate fleeing.  I've paid, haven't I?

A kind woman goes into the back room and tells one of the attendants (I'm guessing) that I have taken my stuff from a desk, that I look volatile and may snap at any second.  The attendant comes out and asks for the receipt.  (She needs to sign it.)  Fortunately for me, and thanks to the kind woman, I did have one more step to go through.  The notary woman thumbed through each of the copies, each of them having at least two different notary stamps, and officially put official stickers on each document -- the final touch.  And then, I was free.  Free at last!

I run all the way to the Ministerio.  A dozen blocks.   I hurdle a cab and pivot off a light-post.  I call Kerry on the run so that she could meet me at the stairs.  I make it upstairs, out of breath and sweaty.  I hand the stuff over to Jimmy.  Jimmy is serene.

"Long day, huh?"

~~~

Turns out we didn't need to see him at all since I'd have to wait in line again.  I'd have to wait to get a little slip of paper I'd take back down to pay a cashier.  I went back yesterday, had the papers approved finally, got the little pieces of paper, and paid the initial visa application fee.  It was supposed to be 30 dollars for the application, but they charged us $120, $30 per person.  I didn't argue.  I just paid and left with a light feeling.  The lightest feeling I've had since the Dead at Soldier Field in '92.

We've learned the hard way to make copies of every receipt, every piece of paper, so after I paid I went out to see my old friend in the floppy hat.

"See you next Wednesday," I told the guy.  He didn't even bat an eye.

"OK."  At least I know how to get back to the Pie Level.