Adventures in Police Clearances...

One of the problems that I think expats will have in this international adoption experience is that the fact that we are expats also indicates that we probably have lived in several places in our lives. The new Hague regulations state that we need police clearance from all the states and countries that we have lived in since age 18.
Between my husband and I, that is California, Washington DC, Virginia, and Florida. Not to mention the country we are now living in. Yikes! And, on top of that we need Child Abuse Clearance as well. Fortunately though, the places we studied abroad don't count. Only 3 months for each of us. I cannot imagine trying to get these clearances from other countries! Bad enough we have to get them from here.

In order to get a police clearance from our current country, we first need FBI clearance to state that we don't have a criminal record in the US. Our local US embassy does not do fingerprinting, but they do write a letter to the local police department requesting that they fingerprint us. This is actually a good thing since apparently they used to do fingerprinting at the embassy and the fingerprint cards were apparently consistently unreadable according to some friends who had theirs rejected. So letter in hand we went to the police station we had been told to go to by the embassy (and confirmed by some friends who had done it). Nope, location changed. It's behind the stadium they told us. One thing I have learned living here is that Arabic is very vague when it comes to directions. For example, the words "next to" and "near" are the same word in Arabic. So you could say "I live next to the grocery store" but in fact you live 1 mile away. By some miracle I actually was able to find a map of this place online. NOTHING in this country is online, particularly accurate maps. So, day 2, off we went to the new fingerprinting place. And, the website even had their hours of operation. And it was wrong. So we showed up 30 minutes after it closed. We confirmed with some police officers hanging out outside that yes we were in the right place.
Day 3 of fingerprinting...
We returned to the supposed fingerprinting location and asked a guard. He told us "door 11". Turns out door 11 was VIP fingerprinting. Not sure if it was the fact that we had 2 babies in tow, the fact that we had a letter from the US embassy or just the fact that we are white (yes, being white often sends us to the front of the line). Anyway, we needed ink fingerprints. But, apparently most of the world, including here, uses the electronic fingerprinting. So, they ushered us into the kitchen. Yes, the kitchen, where they have 2 ink stations set up for fingerprinting us the old fashioned way. We each needed 3 sets. One for FBI, one for California, and one for the I800 immigration form we will soon fill out.
Next step, back to the embassy for them to put some stamp on it... More later.