Loooongggg Overdue

August 31st, 2011

Today I became an Ecuadorian.  How? By taking falsifying government documents and taking advantage of a corrupt government system, of course!  I know, I know.  I've never skipped class (ok, well there was that ONE psych class I accidentally slept through, but the fact that I remember it so vividly and with so much guilt shows how out of character it was for me), am reluctant to jay-walk, and NEVER eat the snacks in the so-called "free food aisle" of Hannaford's, because that is stealing.  So you may not believe me when I say that I am most definitely an illegal alien here in Ecuador.  But rest assured, I am.  Here's how this happened...

So, when you come to Ecuador as an exchange student you must register your Visa within 25 days of arriving in the country.  Then, also within 25 days, you must use your registered Visa to apply for a Censo, which is the Ecuadorian national identity card for foreigners.  I registered my Visa on my 20th day here, and applied for my Censo on my 32nd, mostly because I was too lazy to do it beforehand.  For a country that has it's own time "hora Ecuatoriana", which means that everything happens a half hour late, I pretty much expected them to not care at all that I was a couple days late. How wrong I was.

As I sat in line at the Foreign Services Office, I practiced my best "Aye, Dio Senor! I thought I had 25 business days to register my Censo. Perdoneme!" speech, and my very best "lost gringa in a strange country" face" that has come in handy many a time here.  After waiting in line for two hours and growing increasingly nervous, I breathed a huge sigh of relief when the clerk flipped right past the page with the date on it.  Little did I know, this sigh was premature.  So, so, sooooo premature.

The clerk (actually an immigration policeman) flipped through my papers, and said "I have bad news for you." Shit.  And he pointed to a date on my Visa that someone in Immigrations had forgotten to date.  He then proceeded to explain that in order for him to give me a Censo I would need to go to the Visa processing Offices and have them re-date it.  The only problem with this solution was that if I went back to that office, someone would surely realize that my Visa had technically sort of expired, and I would have to pay a fine of a couple thousand dollars, or maybe be deported...wasn't really sure.  At this point, my host mom and I were both really stressed out and worried about my being sent to the US of A, so naturally we went right to her mom's house to enjoy a nice long lunch.  Typical Ecuadorian reaction there.

Then, after lunch, we had a sort of family meeting to decide what we should do.  After weighing all the legal options, we decided that forgery was the only option.   After all, the missing date had simply been written in with a Bic pen...which we TOTALLY had lying around the house.  Perfect!  Then, we used my friend Katie's passport as a template, and had a little contest to see who could most closely imitate the handwriting of a government official.  My cousin was determined to be the most skilled, and she did the honors of falsifying a government document.  Mischief managed.

Except for one teeennyyy problem, we sort of messed up the year that she was supposed to write.  So my passport now said that my Visa expires in August of 2011, when it was supposed to say 2012.  Double shit.  Lacking any other better option, we just sort of changed the 1 into a 2.  It looked sort of like this: 2012.  In other words, it looked terrible, and like we had done it in our living room. Which, of course, we had.


Anyways, Karla (my host mom) called her dad, who called his friend who just happens to be the head of immigrations and I guess he sort of warned the guys in the Foreign Affairs office that I would be coming in the next day, and that they should help me out.  Thank God.  The next day, we ran in at 8am, presented the same clerk with my homemade passport, and got the Censo.  The clerk had clearly been instructed to ignore our hackjob, but he couldn't help mocking us a little bit. "Oh, what idiot wrote in these numbers, the made a mistake again?" "You didn't write this in at home, did you?" Whatever, he still gave me the card.


 Woohoo!!  So illegal, but it felt so good.