Post-delivery paperwork in Egypt: a pain in the a**

My friend Ms. Four brought my attention to this story about baby buying in Egypt. The Reuters story is written by another friend here in Cairo. Apparently, two U.S. couples have been charged in Egypt with buying babies for illegal adoption, and a third couple is accused of obtaining a forged birth certificate for a child and trying to use it to obtain a U.S. visa. Not only is this a very disturbing story per se, but as we are in the process of acquiring a birth certificate for Karl-Abraham, it is a bit alarming. Already, an overwhelming amount of paper work is required, and if this case has any impact on the U.S. embassy efficiency at all, it would be a negative one (at least from our perspective), I’m sure.

Acquiring an Egyptian birth certificate, which is the first legal step anybody who recently had a baby in Egypt will need to take, was already overwhelming: it required five hours of office-hopping along with a native Egyptian (there’s NO WAY my husband could have done it all by himself, even if he had been able to get by in Arabic), several hundred pounds, seven stamps and A LOT of patience. And this was apparently a very smooth run – according to other eye witnesses, it can be a lot more difficult and take longer. Our next step is to get this well-stamped Arabic certificate officially translated, and only then can we take it to the American embassy, along with seven other official documents (including a proof that my husband has lived in the U.S. for more than four years past his twelfth birthday, and copies of all the pages in our respective passports!). After this awaits another couple of paper work runs, and hopefully by the time we’re going on summer leave, Karl-Abraham will have a passport. If not, I guess we’ll just have to leave him here. The gardener who took care of our plants last summer managed to only kill half of them, so I assume our baby would have a 50-50 chance of survival. As far as I understand, this is not bad for an infant in Egypt.

(If you think I went too far here, and this joke is too morbid, please raise your hand.)