Brooke Osekavage: a Honduran RESIDENT!

Alright, confession time: I have been deceiving my readers ever since I moved here. Although the title of my blog is “Brooke Osekavage: a Honduran Resident,” I have not actually been a legal resident until recently. (Don’t worry, I haven’t been illegally living here, I’ve just been surviving off a temporary visa.) If you read my last blog (all the way through) about my journey to and from Ecuador, you read a tad bit about the visa rules of Honduras. Whenever you enter the country of Honduras you are granted a traveler’s visa that lasts 90 days. To renew said visa you either have to leave the country for a minimum of 3 days before returning, or you have to make the trip to Tegucigalpa to renew it through the migration office. When you are going to live in Honduras, you want that residency.

When we all signed our contracts to work for Vida Abundante we were given the signing bonus of getting residency. We qualify for residency as missionaries while we are here (fun fact: it is a lot easier to get approved for residency for religious reasons than for general work reasons). Trust me, having someone organize and take the lead in the process of getting residency in Honduras is considered extremely lucky. Otherwise, the procedure is a nightmare. We did not get our residency right away; in fact, we had to send our passports to Tegucigalpa when our initial 90 days were running out to get our visas renewed. The lawyer told us that the office had not gotten to our papers yet and we could do nothing else but wait. However, once the migration office does finally get to your papers, they call and you have to be at their office within the week otherwise they stick you back at the bottom of the pile. Well they finally called us in December. Unfortunately, they called too close to the date that we were all leaving to go home for the holidays. Someone on that end of things pulled a few strings and got permission for us to wait until we all returned to Honduras to make the residency journey to Teguc.

The school made plans for us to all go straight to Tegucigalpa as soon as we got back in the country. All of the Gracias and La Unión teachers met in San Pedro Sula (because that is where we all had our flights scheduled to fly into anyways) and we were shipped off to the capital. The trip, like all, came with its bumps, difficulties, and frustrating moments, but I’m going to skip over those parts because I am extremely grateful that the school paid for us to get our residencies and we had a lawyer who took care of every little detail for us. My roommate Heather recently had to go through the headache of trying to renew her residency (since she taught with Vida Abundante last year, who paid for the visa, but now works with the Micro Finance group, who cannot afford to get residency for its workers) and I cannot imagine having to do that on my own – she handled everything as gracefully as possible but she almost pulled all her hair out during the process.

We spent an entire day sitting in the migration office waiting to pass through. We got there plenty early but when they first called us up, the lawyer realized she did not have any of our bank statements from the school so we had to wait an additional two hours for her to run that quick, but vital, errand. During this time we were not allowed to leave to get food, and we were forced to use a terrifying public bathroom. Once she got back and they called us the second time, we were starting to get nervous that we might not make it through. In fact, the woman behind the desk said she would only be able to get through 10 more people that day, and there were 19 of us. Wouldn’t that put you in a sweat? We went through a series of back-ups plans to decide who to send through the line first, who was going to have school the next day, or how we would all get back to our towns if we couldn’t all get through on the same day. Thankfully that woman underestimated her skills and she did in fact get through us all. She had us you sign a few papers, scan our fingerprints, and take a picture to be plastered on the card. (Remember how I lost my suitcase traveling back from Ecuador? I was thrilled to be taking my picture with absolutely no trace of make up on my face and wearing the same clothes that I had been for the previous three days.) I was one of the last people to sit in that cubicle with that woman, and she was quite sick of our group at that point. She called us “an invasion” to her friend and was in no mood to hear jokes about the size of our group. I really just wanted to congratulate her for successfully completing the paperwork for all of us! But she was not having it.

We left all the necessary paperwork with our lawyer so that she can return in 30 days (which was yesterday!) to pick up our cards. The cards are supposed to be sent to us once they are ready, but who knows how long they will take to actually get here. Until then, I do have a little piece of paper that proves that I am a real resident of Honduras!