Burocracia

I've had a few run-ins with Ecuadorian bureaucracy, and let me just say that it makes the state of Hawaii look like a smooth running machine. So far, we've had trouble with our visas and censos, and the process it took to deal with both of these was quite frustrating. The first problem was that our visas were incorrectly issued by the consulate in Chicago way back in May so they were set to expire in December (not ok when every is supposed to stay till Feb). Thus 5 of us students and one of our program directors had to go to the office to get them all extended. The reason why this is silly/confusing is because each person can only work with 5 visas at a time, so for a group of 30 of us, we needed 6 ppl instead of just our program director doing all 30 at once. This limit doesn't really make sense to me, plus then we had to wait for forever in the office itself.

Second run-in was this morning when I woke up at 6am to go to get my censo. Getting up so early is not fun on a Saturday, but necessary here apparently. The censo is basically you getting legally registered in the country and they give you an ID to carry. It must be done by the first 30 days of being in Ecuador (or pay a fine between $20-$2000), so ours had to be done by Monday. A bunch of us went after class yesterday only to find out that the office only does 30 censos each day. Why? I don't know. I know for a fact that they have more migrants than that, but whatever, again, Ecuadorian beauracratic silliness. So we were turned down yesterday afternoon and told to come back tomorrow. So there we were, at 730am on a Saturday, a group of about 12 Kalamazoo students, standing in front of the immigration building. Luckily, we all managed to get our censos today and didn't have to come back on Monday.
Still, the bureacratic nonsense is ridiculous. A few of us didn't have manilla envelopes (blue manilla folders instead) and they refused to use them. I'm sure this is how they make their profits: by forcing unknowing gringos to buy $0.50 manilla envelopes instead of using the perfectly fine other ones they bring with them. All in all, frustrating, but bareable.

Today the national Ecuadorian futbol (soccer) team plays Colombia, so everyone is wearing their jerseys and it's pretty cool. Hopefully we'll get to watch it on a tv or something (the game is in Colombia). Every single individual in this country is excited, not even joking. Should be a fun day, although I think I may need a nap to make up for the morning before getting in on all the excitement.