Registering for residence - it's done! Thank you, Lord.

In the courtyard of our building complex

It is a wet and foggy Saturday evening. I just had to tell about  our day yesterday. To stay in Ukraine we needed a visa which we received while we were in Australia. Then we needed a residency permit which we organised last Monday and our final documentation was a registration of our place of residence. The residency permit was a little complicated but the residency registration was the best yet.

We had until the fifteenth of September to finalize it or face a heavy fine and complications. To do these registrations your landlord must be present. Our landlord is one of the other teachers at the school, so after work on Wednesday we set off.

We go through this passage way to get to the main street.

The stairwell leading to our apartment - Laurel wants to by a torch.

The office is small and the people trying to register are many.  Also there are not counters as we are used to.  There are small windows in the wall at about chest height so men especially have to bend down to speak to the person inside. You stand in line and wait for your turn.  This frequently takes a long time. You also have to remember that the queue you see is not necessarily the real queue.  People come and join the queue and then go off remembering whom they were behind and later on come back and rejoin the queue.  As well people who were once in the queue and have since left to fill out a form perhaps, realize that they have a supplementary question and come back and ask it even if you are in mid-sentence in your turn.  It is not surprising then that it takes one and a half to two hours to do what actually takes fifteen minutes. Well we had filled out forms and they were signed and we thought we could leave when we thought we would just have someone say, "Yes, you are complete."  Well we did and found out that we weren't. We were told we were out of time for our residency registration.  We actually weren't but were treated as if we were.  We had gone the previous Monday and had signed a book in another office about an hours drive away\on the other side of the city.  Traffic is not always good here. Now we were asked on the Wednesday where was our proof that we had signed.  Apparently they couldn't just have that office verify that we had signed in due time.  We needed a receipt and we didn't have one. So all we done on the Wednesday was of no effect. We had to redo some forms and we only had until the close of the office on Saturday (today) to do it.

Our letterbox is no. 14.

So forms were scanned and things were done. By yesterday morning we were ready to try again.  We had the added incentive that the office was only open from 10 - 1 pm on Fridays.  As we naively thought, all we had to do on the Friday was go back to the office with our new forms and hand them in and have stamped and as they say, "Bob's your uncle".  Well, no. We went to the office and tried to finish things but they said we had to go back to the office on the left bank, (remember the one that is about an hour away depending on traffic). Remember also, the clock is ticking. Well we arrived and looked around for the right room and happened to see a man from the Baptist Union who had helped us with the documents. We told him why we were there and he said we were in the wrong place.  He said they were giving us the run around.  He said we should be at a third place not too far from the first place.

Our building from across the road at the park

Knowing that this third place closed at 12.00 pm we set off knowing we could not make it in time. We arrived at 12.10 pm to see some of the same people we had seen at the first place earlier in the morning. We found out that the office was open till 1.00 so as you do we asked the assembled people there who was last in the non-existent queue and then we became the last until someone else arrived,and so on.  We still knew with the number of people there that we wouldn't make it by 1.00 but you wait anyway.  We were about eighth in line. At about 1.05 pm the young man in the office came out and locked the door and went off, but someone knew that he was on lunch and would be back from 2.00 till 4.00 pm.  We waited. By now we were about fourth in line so hope sprang up.  Then Bill and Terry (our landlord) found out that we were missing a stamp on one of our documents and they had to go to room seven for that. Fortunately that didn't take as long.  However there was a fee charged for that.  In our money about ten cents (85 kopiyki).

The park across the road.

That sounds like an easy thing to do.  Think again! It requires a trip to the bank. Yes, Bill and our landlord had to drive to a bank (which is a story in itself) and deposit ten cents in the departments bank account, show our passport and receive a receipt to take back for proof of payment.

Can you find the little squirrel?

Eventually it was 2.00 pm and the whole process started up again. While lunch was on some more people had arrived and were standing near the door but hadn't asked who was the last person in line.  I just hoped they were not people who were really ahead of us. Finally at about 2.40 pm the person ahead of the person ahead of us disappeared through the door,so Bill and Terry went to stand behind the person ahead of us.  The new people who had come during lunch started to protest that they were queue jumping.  Fortunately the other people there stood up for us and said we were the next in line.  At 2.50 pm Bill and Terry went into whatever was behind the door.  At about 3.05 pm Bill called me to come in as well It was a room about three metres by six metres, with a young man at a desk.  The person ahead still was not done.  At 3.15 pm she left (I checked) and the young man without a word came and took our documents and wrote things and stamped things and without a word came and gave them back. If Terry had not asked him a question it would all have been done in complete silence.  I looked at the time when we came out of the door.  It was 3.19 pm.  It had taken five and a half hours and ten cents to accomplish something that took less than four minutes.

A 'fixed route taxi' (marshrutka) outside our building.

Now we may stay in Ukraine till July (my papers but not Bill's, for some reason, say I can stay a month longer). If for some reason we changed our address we would have to register our residence again.  It is not difficult to see why local landlords do not want to rent to foreigners because your landlord has to be present for the registration process. When I asked Bill why we had to register our place of residence he said (tongue in cheek) it is because the government does't want a tent city of homeless Australians on the outskirts of Kyiv.  The government can now sleep easy knowing we have a roof over our heads. I am glad it was explained to me. I thought we would include some pictures of the area we live in after all the time to register just where that is.