And We're In!

We woke up Friday morning, feeling confident that our second day at the Border Crossing would meet with instant success. They might wave us straight through, or ask for a small fee, but either way we anticipated having lunch in San Felipe with our kids!

Jovi and I walked around the city of El Centro in the morning, and when we returned to the hotel saw Randy shake hands with a man in the parking lot. What could that possibly be about? The night before, while searching for a hotel on my phone, I found several advertised at $17, “for adults only,” so I wasn’t exactly excited about Randy doing any dealings in the parking lot. But when I approached, Randy introduced me as his wife and the older gentleman shook my hand with glee and called me “sister.” He drove off, and Randy told me that the man had grown up in a wonderful children’s home after his dad died and his mom couldn’t afford to take care of him. We have stickers on the side of our car that say “Sonshine Hacienda” so he had approached Randy and asked about our role with the children. It continues to bless me when others share their stories with us!

We grabbed a cup of coffee and headed to the border, feeling like old pros at this point. Each of the Border Crossing agents gave us instructions in Spanish and, while we didn’t understand most of it, we knew the drill and simply nodded as we drove from the initial inspection to the x-ray machine to the waiting area. We waited about 30 minutes for someone to come read the x-ray and give the approval to move into the final inspection area. By that point it was 9 a.m. and things were starting to look alive for the day.

The night before we had been told which office to go to when we arrived in the morning, so we headed in that direction. When we entered the office, the man who had told us we had to stay in a hotel for the night because the person who could help us had gone home for the day was sitting behind the desk. Had he meant that HE was going home for the night and couldn’t help us? He told us to take a seat while he made some phone calls. When he was done he said, “Let’s go see if someone can help you.” We walked over to the aduana office and he explained to the customs officer that we had been there the night before, had our paid paperwork from the Consulate, and needed another piece of paper. The man told us to wait outside.

The next 6 hours are pretty much a blur of people talking about us and no one being able to help. Aduanas petting and loving on Jovi, and travelers stopping to talk to us about Sonshine Hacienda.

At one point Randy asked if we could just put our paid piece of paper in the shredder and pay for an inspection like everyone else. Which seemed to trigger something, because we started to feel some forward progress after that. They told us they didn’t want us to have to pay again, but we needed this other piece of paper for that to happen. We saw hundreds of people go through inspections and even the workers started leaving for the day at 2 p.m., but we were still waiting.

Finally someone came out to inspect our belongings. They took our itemized list and started checking off the items they could see: clothing, shoes, television, blender. The trouble came when they saw the wireless keyboard for my computer in its original box. “You have new things?” he asked. “No,” we said. The man took my keyboard box and tore it open. He immediately saw how dusty the keyboard was and said, “Used.” “Si.”

He told us all was good with the inspection and we just had to wait for the piece of paper to be generated. We owed about 500 pesos (approximately $26) in taxes, but with the piece of paper that fee would be waived. We waited another hour for that paper to be generated, which turned out to be a single sheet of paper with a simple stamp on it. The man who delivered it to us told us it cost $200 (American) to print the paper. Randy handed him the money and we got out of there before anyone could change their minds.

In the end, we probably would have paid the exact same amount had we not had our original piece of paper from the Sacramento Consulate and we would have saved ourselves 20 hours. But we were through! And we were starving. The GPS took us to a pizza place, which just happened to be in the local shopping mall. The food court contained half a dozen Mexican restaurants, a sushi place, Burger King and pizza.

After pizza we drove the two hours to San Felipe, where we were greeted by Gary and Karen, Bernardo and Imelda (the other onsite administrators), the kids and the mamas. They all squealed when they saw Jovi and seemed happy to see us too. Bernardo and Randy unloaded the car so we’d have some clothing and toiletries for the night, while Imelda and I went in search of sheets and towels to use until we unpacked ours.

Randy and I showered and fell into bed exhausted but happy that we’d finally arrived!