Trying to avoid deportation

Bratislava, Friday 25 September

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own personal opinions, not those of the Fulbright Commission or the U.S. Department of State.

This has been a busy and eventful week.

I had my first class on Wednesday evening, but actually that was pretty uneventful. I'll tell you all about it another post soon. Someone broke into the garage and lobby of our apartment building in the early hours yesterday, but that didn't really affect us.

First I need to vent about the Slovak bureaucracy and the Kafka-esque hoops we are trying to jump through in order to get our residency permits and avoid having to leave the country before our 90-day tourist visas expire on November 9.

The list of things that I need in order to get a residency permit is pretty simple: passport, pictures, statement from the Slovak Department of Education that I'm teaching here and will earn income to support myself, FBI criminal history check (with certified translation into Slovak), medical tests showing that I don't have HIV, syphilis, tuberculosis, or hepatitis B or C (likewise officially translated), a notarized copy of our lease, a document from the local registrar of deeds certifying that our landlord indeed owns the apartment, and a 6-page application that includes names, addresses, and birth dates of my spouse, parents, children, and siblings.

OK, maybe that's not simple, but Suzanne needs all of those things ... plus a notarized (in Slovak, of course) statement signed by me saying that I promise to support her financially while we are here, plus documentation that she is covered by medical insurance while she is here (with appropriate translation), and plus, of course, the marriage certificate from Wadena County, authenticated with an apostille by the Minnesota Secretary of State in St. Paul (also with official translation) documenting that she really, truly is married to me.

We have been working since June on accumulating these items. Almost every item has given us trouble of one kind or another, requiring us to go back and re-do something that we thought was already done.

On Wednesday, our landlady brought us the notarized copies of the lease (of course we need two, one for my application and one for Suzanne's)---the last piece of the puzzle! So we went on Thursday morning to the Fulbright office, where they had been accumulating all of our documents for us and arranging for translations and official local documents.

At that point, the Fulbright office turned us over to Beáta Bučeková at an organization called Enterprise Resources International (ERI) to have her shepherd us through the application process with the Foreign Police. Apparently the lines at the Foreign Police office in Bratislava start forming before 6am (and no, we don't have any Syrian refugees clogging up the process---this is normal), so ERI sends someone to get in line for us, then lets us know about what time our number will be called (if indeed we manage to get in the same day), picks us up and drives us to the office, and interprets for us during the application submission.

I was already on the bus from the Fulbright office to the university when Beáta called to say that she wanted us to bring our documents to her office so that she could check them over. Suzanne had the documents and took them to the office. And it's a good thing that she did!

Beáta found not one, not two, but three errors in our documents, all relating to my name or birthday. First, the official document from the Slovak Education Ministry had my birthday as November 13 rather than 16. The Foreign Police would have used this as an excuse not to issue a permit, so that will have to be redone. That's pretty easy because they are local and they actually want me in the country, and because it's in Slovak it won't need to be translated.

Second, the notarized letter in which I promise to support Suzanne had my name misspelled. Likewise: an excuse to reject her application for residency. But again, easy to fix: just one more trip to the notary with a corrected document.

The big one was the third error: our marriage certificate, newly obtained this summer from Wadena County and personally delivered by us to the Minnesota Secretary of State in St. Paul for an apostille in July. It also has my birthday wrong: November 11th instead of the 16th. Again, this would totally invalidate the legitimacy of Suzanne's application and result in its denial because, after all, she might be married to another Jeffrey Allen Parker who was born 5 days earlier in Wadena and who does not have any legitimate business in Slovakia.

So what to do? We are supposed to submit the applications no later than 60 days after entering the Schengen Area, which occurred on August 11, so October 10 is our deadline. If we can get everything in order by the deadline, then we can apply and stay. If not, well, Beáta suggested that we could go to Croatia (out of the Schengen Area) and then re-enter Schengen to restart our 90-day tourist visas. It's only a 4.5 hour drive to Zagreb, so that's not impossible, but we are really not thrilled about a forced trip just to step outside the borders so that we can step back in. And given the refugee situation on the borders of the Schengen Area, it seems like a really good idea to avoid this, even though we'd be entering back into Slovenia rather than Hateful Hungary.

So the ideal solution is to try to get corrected marriage certificates produced in Wadena, authenticated in St. Paul with an apostille, sent to Bratislava, and translated officially into Slovak, all in time to submit the documents by October 10. We will try!

I immediately sent an email yesterday to the Wadena County Clerk of Court. Now a few of you readers (my siblings) will know that our marriage was officially recorded in Wadena County by no less a person than Florence Claydon, a naturally blue-haired, sub-5-foot spinster who served as clerk of court for decades in addition to playing the organ (very slowly) and directing the church choir (of which I was for several years a member) at the Congregational Church. How could Florence have messed up my birthday? She was known for her LoisHobbsian accuracy and efficiency!

When, in my email conversation with the current clerk, I expressed surprise that Florence could have made such an error, he responded that her lovely cursive writing was invariably accurate, but not always easy to read, and that my birth date on our certificate could equally easily be read as the 16th or the 11th. He even sent me a scan of the original ... and I have to agree. It would actually be easier to read the date as 11 than as 16.

But because I was born in Wadena County, he was able to look up my birth certificate and change the official date to the 16th. He even waived the fee for the new copies and sent them overnight to the Secretary of State in St. Paul to obtain the required apostille. No bureaucratic hassles in Wadena: Minnesota Nice strikes again. :)

Minnesota Nice even extended to the good people at the Secretary of State's office in St. Paul, Their very helpful customer service specialist will receive the certificates today and immediately get them authenticated with apostilles at no charge. But then what? They can send them to Bratislava by Fed Ex, but only if I can get them a pre-paid number to charge. Otherwise they can send them by regular mail, which takes weeks.

So all I need is a Fed Ex account number to give them, right? Well, I've never heard of "Memphis Nice," so maybe my experience with Fed Ex today should not be a surprise. I have been trying all day to get a pre-paid number or a Fed Ex account number, with no success. The Slovak office of Fed Ex does not issue accounts to individuals, only companies. The U.S. Web site gives me a user ID but won't let me create an account with a credit card: It tells me "An error has occurred and we are unable to process your request. Please try again." I've been "trying again" for 8 hours, including using the Reed proxy server and Suzanne's U.S. VPN account to try to convince Fed Ex that I am in the United States, but to no avail. And the Fed Ex online "help" has been anything but helpful. Neither the Slovak nor the U.S. help person was able to offer the slightest interest in or assistance with my plight. From now on, I'm avoiding Fed Ex whenever there is an alternative!

If I was unlucky with Fed Ex, I'm very lucky to have wonderful generous relatives who live in Minneapolis! My brother or his wife will pick up the documents on Monday morning and deliver them to a shipping office (either Fed Ex, or preferably DHL, which is less than half the price and one day faster, and which didn't earn my ire all day today!) so that they get here by the middle of next week. If all goes well and we can get them translated quickly, we'll just make our application deadline and won't have to drive the 9-hour round trip to the Croatian border and back.

I'll post again over the weekend with details of my first class session and other things about the week. Until then, enjoy the first days of autumn wherever you are, and hug an efficient American bureaucrat for me! Even if it's at the DMV or the Post Office! Really! We had no idea ...