Adventures in Red Tape

After mountains of paperwork, numerous visits to the Migraciones office in Tacna, and a 22.5 hour bus ride (complete with a flat tire in the middle of the desert) to Lima, Allie, Thomas, and I finally arrived at the Migraciones office in Lima, ready to receive our carnetes de extranjería, our Peruvian residency cards that are similar to the identification cards Peruvian citizens carry. But bad luck and hilarious misunderstandings followed us 1,307 km up the Peruvian coast and turned what should have been a one hour visit to get our pictures taken and our cards printed into a ten hour endeavor.

Somehow, the most important piece of paperwork from the Archbishop of Tacna requesting that we be granted Peruvian residency was missing; it´s absence overlooked months earlier. And so ensued a flurry of telephone calls to Tacna to ask that these documents be created, signed by the Archbishop, taken to the office in Tacna, and emailed to the office in Lima. (Bear in mind, we don´t have cell phones. Luckily, the office had a curious contraption called a "public phone" that rapidly ate our money in exchange for a few moments of grainy conversation. I´m told these machines exist elsewhere as well, with a high density of them in Lancaster County, PA. That is, until the Amish decided to allow cell phone use because cell phones don´t have electrical cords. I don´t entirely understand this logic. How often can one say that they`re less technologically connected than some Amish people?)

The documents were made, signed, and sent over to Migraciones in Tacna and, justo, the power goes out. Power outages in Tacna are about as common as Georgetown basketball being embarrassingly bad (sorry, I´m told this year the team has actually done well? Who knew we had it in us!) and we were stuck, in Lima, not knowing why the documents hadn´t arrived yet. Enter Allie´s host parents! By some means (that were certainly not illegal but that we didn´t entirely understand) the documents were emailed to Allie. We had to leave the building and go to an internet cafe to print out the documents from Allie`s email. Before we left the building, we got a pass to reenter later (it was after-hours by this time, that´s how long we had been in the building). A minor goof-up with the documents - my name was "Nelly Olson" - but it was hardly surprising after a day of mishaps.

When we reentered the building, one of the guards stopped us, convinced our stamped, dated, and signed passes were forged. He radioed up to the office on the third floor where we were heading: "I´ve got a family down here that claims you gave them passes to get back to the third floor?" And as he looked down the row from Thomas to Allie and to me, he said, "Yeah, it´s a man, his wife, and their child." Stunned into silence (and having one of those "maybe I didn`t understand the Spanish and he actually said something remarkably logical" moments), we didn`t manage to correct him and he repeated it a second time to the confused silence on the other end of the radio. Once corrected, we were allowed upstairs while Nelly, the daughter of 23 year old parents, questioned her identity and everything she`d ever known to be true.

And thus, at 5:30 PM we handed in our papers and breezed through the entire process in about 20 minutes. BAM. Card in hand, I walked out an official Peruvian resident who can exit and enter the country without a passport and buy reduced price airfare and, well actually, that´s about it.

Oh, Peru. Sometimes you remind me of a delinquent child - difficult to understand but impossible not to love.