Apparently the whole I-need-a-new-birth-certificate issue kind of got left out of my blogging. So now I have to fill in backstory before I can tell you the latest developments.
I dutifully got online in July to request my new birth certificate. The main hangup here is that Puerto Rico’s government website is largely in Spanish (in a lot of places you can click to an English version, but not all of them). Fortunately, I did it while Josh was visiting (yes, this was back in July 2010) and he helped me get around the Spanish stuff. Basically, I just needed to tell them a bunch of info from my original certificate (like my parents’ info) and, oddly enough, stuff that wasn’t on the original (like what city the hospital was in). So that involved a few phone calls to my parents, but we got through it. Uploaded a scan of my photo ID, and done!
Except not really. I got an email 8/2/2010 (so a month later) saying that there was an error. Actually, it said a bunch of Spanish stuff, then it had an English version stating that there was an error. The error itself, however, was not translated, so I had to get some help figuring it out. But the gist of it was that the name on my ID didn’t match the name on my birth certificate (duh, I got married), so to call them so I could send them a copy of my marriage certificate. I could also check my application’s status if I followed this link (which took me to, you guessed it, a webpage all in Spanish).
At this point, I have to admit to being really lame. I’ve been really scared to call the phone number they gave because what if nobody there speaks English? Or just has too thick an accent for me to understand? So, yeah, I have let that email sit in my inbox for over a year. I know. I suck. But on Monday, while Kyle was home for lunch, I decided that enough was enough and I was just going to suck it up and call the number. I did. And it rang. And rang. And rang. (You get the idea.) So I hung up and, in my frustration, showed Kyle the original email and the Spanish website they sent me. He told me that if I were using Chrome (I was in Firefox), it’d offer to translate the page for me! So I pulled it up in Chrome and, sure enough, it did! And it worked! Brilliantly! And it turns out that I’ve had the ability to just upload a scan of my marriage certificate, rather than calling and getting an address to mail one to, all this time! So I did that and they now have it and my application is marked as In Process, not Error. Yay! Maybe I’ll get a valid birth certificate before my daughter does!
YAY!