Paperwork

One of the things that becomes a part of a missionary's life, or of anyone who lives in a foreign country, is dealing with documents. Passports, visas, identifications, voting information, drivers' licenses, and the list goes on and on.

In our family we have four dual-citizens. That keeps things interesting! Our family of five travels with nine passports. That's right! Nine! Five American passports and four Brazilian passports. Those same four also each have two birth certificates. We have two marriage licenses. Jeremy has two voter's registrations, and he and I each have two drivers' licenses.  Then there are identification cards, military registrations, tax information and much more.

We work hard at trying to keep up with all these documents and keeping them up to date, but it is quite a chore...and an expense! We want to be able to enter or exit either country at any time in case of an emergency.

I was thinking of all this because Jonathan's Brazilian passport has been expired for a few months, but since we have just recently gotten settled into one place we hadn't had a chance to renew it until now. Jeremy scheduled an appointment online, and we left early this morning to be there at 8:15. When we got there they informed us that the Federal Police is on strike, so they are only issuing passports for emergencies. Why they are still scheduling appointments, I have no idea...but I won't get into all that.  Now we wait a little longer, and hopefully they will get their disputes settled before we need to go somewhere where he will need his passport!