Well, the trip to the immigration office was interesting, but not at all successful. There are at least 6 documents that you have to bring from the states--originals of birth certificates for each of us, original marriage license, good conduct reports from the local police station as well as a letter from our sending church. All of those documents have to be "apostiled" by the Missouri Secretary of State. We brought them with us when we came this summer. Once here, they have to be translated into Spanish by one of the Salvadoran government approved translators--we got that done in late July. We took our documents as well as the documents from VidaNueva indicating what we are doing while here in El Salvador. We were hopeful that everything would be in order and after review we would be on our way to residency.
Well . . . . . not that easy! We were told today that since we left El Salvador in August (we returned to the states for our nephew's wedding) that our good conduct letters from May 2010 (before we left) were no longer valid. We must have new letters before our paperwork can be considered complete. All that said, we're not sure how we can get this done since we are here, not there. When we got them from LSPD, we each had to go request the letter in person. If and when we are able to get them, they will need to be aspostiled, brought to El Salvador and translated.
We return to the states (Tampa, FL) in October for our niece's wedding; we will not be back to Lee's Summit until December 17 . . . so, perhaps, the entire process will need to wait until that time. Please pray for wisdom on how to handle this situation . . . if we proceed we believe we will need to have everything completed and accepted prior to leaving the country on October 20--it will likely be very difficult to accomplish everything in the next 30 days. If we request the letters, but don't get everything processed, we will be in the same situation--any letters we receive will be invalidated once we leave the states again on October 20. Our heads are spinning tonight--tomorrow we will begin making calls to see what, if anything, can be done from here. Of course, there are fees to be paid for each step of the process, so we will incur additional costs for redoing the documents, getting new apostiles and having them translated a second time.
On another note, we also found out because we have been in the country for more than three months, that in addition to the good conduct letter from the states, we will need a similar document from the police in El Salvador. William says that the lines at the police administrative office will not be short!
We know that this is where God wants us, so we will trust Him to work this all out in His timing, whether October or January.
No comments:
Post a Comment