Sweet Success!

For someone who worked in banking, paperwork really was never that mysterious to me. I figured I pretty well had it all down. It's not rocket science; fill in all the blanks, follow the checklists and make sure that your 'i's' are dotted and your 't's' are crossed.

When it came to applying for residency we did our homework. We contacted the Ecuadorian Consulate in Montreal to determine what we needed and worked diligently at securing the required documents, translations, apostilizations and notarizations. We'd actually done quite well, except for a pesky timing issue. As previously mentioned some of our documents had "expired".

This is what we feel we've climbed during this process.

Well, what followed was an exercise in frustration. We were under the gun. To get new criminal record checks we had to have an Ecuadorian notary authenticate English documents and verify our identities. This is not an easy task. Once this was done, we had to arrange to have the criminal record checks sent through their process (notarized coloured copies, then sent to the DFAIT to be apostatized, then sent to the Consulate to have them legalized. Ridiculous.

Be forewarned, the largest challenge (assuming you're in Ecuador already) is arranging for couriers. In this day and age it's completely unacceptable that you cannot arrange for pick up and return delivery. We had to send documents to Canada (thank you generous and patient family members!) and then our family had to arrange to have documents sent to the required agencies and returned to them. Once back they returned them (via courier) to us. Yikes!

Never the less, we persevered, watched the clock (we were running out of time on our marriage certificate) and finally had our documents submitted successfully!

Giddy with success! (As giddy as Ron gets over anything.)

Wooooooooooooooo hooooooooooooooooo!  While there was some misunderstanding with the residency office, most of our stress and difficulty came for the whole courier problem.

It took four months (from when we attempted to first apply for residency) and the biggest cost was...you guessed it...courier fees.

If you want to see the documents required here's a link to my prior post: RESIDENCY REQUIREMENTS (this is for residency based on pension income).

We are giddy with success, though there are still hurdles to jump, we hope that the course is smoother from here on in.