Keeping My Fingers Crossed

Oh well! After a month of me constantly chasing Jawad on the procedures of getting my residence permit, finally today i got a start on the procedure. The ironic thing is it was not Jawad that helped me on this, it was KC's branch manager.

We went for lunch at the branch's manager house 2 days ago and was talking about life in Sahara and the life here and eventually we were talking about me leaving in 2 weeks time and the shipment is still not arriving. And he asked me about my residence permit. After explaining to him, he quickly made some calls and viola! Today i was on my way to get it done, finally.

It's interesting how slow Algerian can be and how important it is to have relationship ties in this country. Jawad told  me that he has been trying to call the police department to get information on how to get my residence permit. Well he did finally got the information after 3 weeks plus and all i had to do was to get my xray and blood test done and submit the application with 16 of my recent pictures. And i waited another 1 week just to get transportation arrangement. Nothing was available until i told my story to the branch manager. He managed to get all arrangement in 1 day.

So today i woke up and went to the office together with KC. From there a local drove me around to do my Xray, then for blood testing and finally snapping my 16 pieces of pictures. What amused me is all these were done in approximately 2 hours but the whole ordeal of pushing, waiting and further pushing was 1 month, ie 4 weeks! Now whenever i think of this, i will then begin to feel grateful of the standard in Malaysia. Apparently we are still "fast"!

Anyway i will be getting the results back tomorrow and hopefully i will be able to get them to the police station and get all necessary documents signed. What i knew is, for sure, the signed documents will have to sent to Algers to be signed by the top management and then only send back to me. Since Friday and Saturday are weekend here, meaning the documents will only be sending over on Sunday. And it will definitely takes 1 week for them to sign which i dont know why, and another week for them to send it back to Oran and then a couple of days before the police station will notify us to collect. By then i would be long gone and should be enjoying the sun in Malaysia.

Let's cross fingers and just hope for once that things will be really fast and i can get my permit before i leave in 2 weeks time.  If fingers are not enough i will surely cross my toes too if that helps! Haha

I AM CROSSING MY FINGERS REALLY TIGHTLY NOW!