Scott here, giving my 2 cents. Life here is composed of what the West
considers horrendous inefficiency. For
us it’s a fine line between a playful shake of the head, and a downward spiral
in to cynicism. Things don’t surprise us
as much anymore. We have learned to take
each day in stride with changed expectations of what a “success” is. Over the past few years I have shared this
lesson God teaches me—that He is NOT in a hurry—and I think to reinforce
patience as a lifelong lesson, he put my hurry-up personality in this slow-down
culture.
Here’s what I mean.
We arrived in one piece with all our bags and kids in tow, and
immediately had to start looking for a house to rent. We always want to be in a neighborhood to be
directly among the people. After looking at several places we found our house,
right across the street from a beautiful park and a 5 minute walk from our
Center. Once you find a place you have
to get permission from the local police, then you can actually sign the
contract. So I went to the station with
the requisite documents, and was sent with another document in an envelope to
meet an officer who would give clearance. I got the officer’s phone number and
he told me to find him in a park a mile away!
He was just hanging out there with a buddy and so I joined them as he
did a brief interview sitting on the grass.
He consented to our living in the house, but found the envelope didn’t
have the paper to sign! The initial
officer who prepped it had put it in the wrong envelope. So the officer in the park sent me back and
told me to have the station call him and he’d agree. That worked out upon my return, but to finish
the process they needed my “code.” This
is a number attached to your file, so they can track your housing arrangements
if you end up moving within the city. My
code was on a piece of paper tucked inside an elusive purple binder somewhere
in our storage garage. To find it I
needed to move into the house, but I couldn’t move until I had the code! I didn’t think I’d need it, or that at least
it’d be in their database if I did. They
sent me to another station in another district in where I had initially
received my code to get it from their database, as stations are not networked
across the city. I arrived there only to
find that, unsurprisingly, it had moved.
This happens about every year, and the station responsible for a certain
neighborhood may be nowhere near it.
Fortunately, a friend is the chief of that station. When I called he explained in general where
it moved to. After 45 minutes of traffic
and asking specific directions, I found it, went inside to their database
office, and was told they could not find my code. I had to return to the initial office in
charge of my new neighborhood to do a new interview to get a new code! Upon returning, the officer thought of one
more thing; we could check their own database.
By a miracle the woman working that office recognized me from having
entered my data 5 years ago when they went digital. Still her search came up empty until she had
the idea to search by passport number.
Voila! My info popped up! She had entered my name in the database in
the local alphabet instead of Latin letters, but the searches were all done by
Latin script. What would have been 20
minutes turned into 3 hours, and 20 miles of driving!
Things here just take time.
You can fight it, but you’ll always end up frustrated. Patience is a lesson thrust upon us on a
daily basis. It’s a good thing too, as
the Kingdom grows in this way. You cannot
rush anyone along; you have to go with the speed of God’s current. Better to pay attention to and synchronize
with that, than to try to paddle ahead.
