Awaiting Residency

I (Derrick) grew up with the tradition of reading stories from the year at Christmastime.  Here's the storied I shared this year.

“We are calling to let you know that your application for residency has been approved”: the long awaited phone call that I could never quite imagine. It came while on a bus ride towards Nicaragua’s east coast; we were about 4 hours into our trip when the phone rang. “I’ll be in as soon as I can when I’m back,” I told them.

Let me introduce you to a word in Spanish: el trámite.  Trámites are legal processes, involving lots of letters to the appropriate people, proper documentation from various sources to back up any request, and the right approval from the right people at the right time.

In the story of getting legal residency in Nicaragua, I’ll mostly skip over the first part about gathering the documents.  But for just one example of this run around, there was the background check, that started with a simple online request in the U.S. and the letter came in the mail. Unfortunately it expired before all the other documents were in order, so I had to do it in Managua through Interpol.  With Interpol, you deposit the fee in Interpol’s bank account, drive across town to the central police station, present the deposit receipt, a mug shot, passport photocopies, etc. and wait until you’re called and approved to pick up the document. Unfortunately Interpol’s check is only valid for a month.  I ended up requesting an Interpol check three times. 

From December 2015 through April 2016, I was gathering, translating, getting apostilles, etc. for our documents. I went with our lawyer to present my application on April 18, 2016 at Immigration. They gave me a flimsy slip of paper, the colilla, that said to check back in June.  Little did I know how long I would need to hold on to that little slip.

My first conflict while waiting for residency came around a border crossing in late May of the same year. I went to Immigration to ask if there was any exit visa or anything required to travel to Honduras for meetings later that week.  The official flipped through my passport and told me that nothing was necessary, I was fine to leave. On the bus, leaving Nicaragua, there was again no problem.  However at the end of the week, as I came back into Nicaragua, someone noticed that I had not gotten an extension after my courtesy visa was cancelled. I tried to explain that I had just been to Immigration and they assured me that it was in order.  Eventually they agreed to let me in temporarily and wrote in my passport: 5 days to abandon the region.  I went to Immigration in Managua and told them my story. There was not a chance to pay a fine; I would have to cross into Costa Rica (which is outside of the CA4 region), stay 72 hours and return.  With few options, we decided to make the lemonade from lemons, take the family to a hotel with a pool in the city of Liberia, Costa Rica and try to simply enjoy the weekend.  Back from the trip, I had a fresh 90 days and from that point on I was very careful to get my extensions.

Still waiting on Immigration a year later in May 2017, a second conflict came up when MCC Nicaragua’s RUC number was about to expire that month.  The RUC, the Registro Único del Contribuyente, is the identification number for paying our taxes in Nicaragua. Unfortunately, in order to renew the RUC, we needed a legal representative, registered with the Ministry of the Interior.  However, the Ministry of the Interior wouldn’t recognize me as legal representative until they saw a residency card.  And Immigration still was saying that the residency application was still in process.  In this case, maybe there was an interest in keeping the money coming their way.  We made our case to the Ministry of the Interior, and they accepted my power of attorney document, but only after getting a lawyer’s authenticated copied, stamped with these little timbre stickers. They issued us the document certifying the change of legal representation. With this document, we were able to make the same change with the Directorate General of Income, to successfully renew our RUC and keep the MCC office open.  We celebrated with donuts.

Month after month I would make my trip to Immigration to wait in lines to first ask if there was any update on the application. After the inevitable “no,” I would pay C$500 (around $16) for a thirty day extension stamp in my passport.  I would sometimes sit there at Immigration and my mind would start to wander. Which official was in a good mood? What would be the way of asking questions or probing in order to get the most positive result? What behaviors were other applicants demonstrating and did that help or hurt their cause? Really, all I could do was wait.

We ran into another conflict when the bank asked for updated information about our organization, in order to keep our account open.  The Ministry of the Interior issues a Proof of Compliance each year after we turn in our financial statements for the previous year, but until I had residency, they would only issue them for limited periods of time.  We got one of these Proof documents to make our updates with the bank, but in the time that they were carrying out the trámite, the process, the document expired and the updated changes were denied.  We requested another Proof, but this time the Ministry of the Interior said they needed to see something more of an update or documentation from Immigration, which Immigration had told us on multiple occasions they only provide for residency renewals, not first time applications.  We were starting to get into a tight situation. 

When we started this process, we were told that applications of this sort are usually approved in around five months.  I wasn’t the only person waiting.  Many people speculated about possible reasons as they waited: delays because of the election, changes in Immigration procedures, increasing centralization of the government, suspicion of NGOs and foreign workers, and so on.

A year and a half after turning in my application, I got that phone call from Immigration. “Thanks be to God and thanks to you all!” I told the official.

*****

While I often felt powerless in my visits to Immigration, it seems important to acknowledge that I did have benefits and privileges throughout this process. We had a lawyer to support the preparation of my application and to give us council along the way, our office assistant Yolanda is familiar with these various government ministries and was something of a lawyer/advocate at times for us as well, we had financial resources to cover the expenses of the process, and the list could go on. This process was slow and gave us some headaches along the way, however, many people around the world are struggling with these political systems with much less support and in much more challenging circumstances.