It's Official

Today, all 5 of us left our house at 6:45 am to go to the Office of Immigrations for the 7th time.
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We finally had all of our paperwork in order - a terribly terrible long and boring story that I won't bore you with - and our tourist visas expired today. We hoped and prayed that this nightmare would be behind us and we'd be official residents of Argentina.

We got to the office, waited for 30 minutes (which is no time at all!), talked to someone who discovered that one of our papers - that we had just gotten - had already expired. The look on Chris's face must have convinced him to waive this minor infraction and we were sent to the next person. (A total miracle, by the way.)

We all got fingerprinted and signed a formal declaration of our personhood - even Johnny wrote his cute little name, whispering, "Mommy, does the 'J' go this way?"

After this was completed by all 5 of us, we were moved down the hall to the next person. [He was a huge blessing and we actually exchanged information with him because he would like to start his own business and is interested in what we are doing here.] We waited about 2 hours while the paperwork was processed. During this time, I was able to take the boys to their summer camp and then returned to sign some more papers.

After this was finished, Chris and I needed to go to 2 separate banks to pay the rather large fees. It went smoothly at the Banco de Córdoba. Not so at the Banco de la Nación de Argentina. By the time we got to the front of the line (1 person separated us from the teller), the bank's computer system died.

Gracias a Dios, it was resuscitated, we paid our pesos, speed-walked back to the Immigration office, gave our receipts, and signed more papers. We got our temporary paperwork that proves we're legal (they say the real thing will arrive in the mail), caught a taxi, and picked the kids up from summer camp in the nick of time.

We're legal! We can work officially now. Can you believe it?

Now, it's back to studying. Here is Johnny studying on Rosetta Stone while drinking mate. He loves it (the mate, not the studying).

As you know, our first 6 months here have been dedicated to formal language acquisition and culture adaptation. We have one more month of formal studying and are so excited to actually start our micro-finance work....