Sunday, July 12, 2009

Brazilian Law Troubles

Right now im still in Sao Paulo on our friend Marcelo's computer at his house. We couldn't leave last night because I didn't have adequate authorization for me to travel internationally since I'm still a minor. This is extremely frustruating and absurd but for now I'm stuck in Brazil until I can get the authorization. The problem is that the international travel laws changed a few months ago so my authorization to travel from CIEE is no longer valid and now to travel internationally I need authorization papers from both my mother father. Since my dad isn't here he needs to fax us the papers and then me and my mom need to go to a judge to accept the papers and then finally we should be able to leave. Even if I go on the same flight as my mom we still need the papers. Yesterday we were denied access to the check-in and were sent to the Police inside the airport to see if we could get authorization. The police denied us and sent us to a judge today. We got to the court at 8:40am today and got in line with a bunch of other families in the same situation. Unfortunately the court where they sent us was only for minors with both parents present and for juvenile criminals. It was a complete dead end. The judge didn't even talk to us at first, after a half hour of us waiting outside in the cold she sent a random woman out saying that we wouldn't be able to get authorization because our paper was in english and we needed papers from my father. We managed to barge into the judges room and talked to her but she was extremely stubborn and wouldn't help us. She kept saying that we didn't have the correct papers and that we were at the wrong place. She sent us to another location that we need to go to tomorrow at 1pm to try and get authorization there. In the meantime my dad will try to send a fax authorizing me. Then before 5pm today we need to go to the airport to change both my flight, which I already changed and payed $200 dollars in fines, and my mom's flight to a later date hoping we get the authorization from the other judge. We just finished searching all over the neighborhood for a fax, we found one but who knows if it will work, or if tomorrow the judge will give us authorization, plus we are looking at around $500 dollars or more in fines from changing flights and who knows when we will finally get back to the US. If EVERYTHING goes perfectly we will get on the plane tomorrow night. But that's only if everything goes right. Let's pray it does.

1 comment:

Joelle said...

Thats so aggravating. Hope to see you very soon!