S's ikamet (residence permit) card arrived today. One on hand the process has been straightforward and almost exactly three months after he was born, we have his card. On the other hand, like any bureaucratic process here, it is invariably stressful.
Here's an insight into the stresses of the ikamet process.
For first time applications, an appointment is needed (and a passport, which delayed our application until S's British passport arrived). After filling out an application online, you click and are given an appointment day and time. There's no choice on the appointment day or time and no ability to change it without cancelling and redoing the whole application. You get what you're given. And as we were going to be in Eskişehir for one week in August and on holiday for two weeks in September, we were hoping and praying that the appointment wouldn't be while we were away. Thankfully, it was four days before we went to Eskişehir.
And then at the appointment, the official said that he had to take an original copy of S's birth-certificate-equivalent documents rather than the notarised copy. Which would have been fine, except we'd been told by the population office where you get this particular document from that it isn't something they keep giving out - so now we've lost one of our original copies and there's a niggle in the back of our minds about what happens next time we need to apply as we could get stuck between two different government offices.
After an ikamet appointment, and provided all your paperwork is in order and accepted, you get sent away with a stamped piece of paper that lets you leave the country for up to 15 days and you await a text telling you that your ikamet card is on its way. However, you don't know how long the card will take to come - it could be a couple of weeks, it could be up to 3 months.
İkamets have to be signed for and a passport shown, so if you're not in when it arrives, it gets left at the post office for you to collect. So this last week we have been really praying that the card would either come before our holiday in September or after it, because if the card arrived while we were away, we didn't know how long the post office would keep it for before sending it back (but it would probably be less than two weeks) and what happened if it was sent back.
And then it was announced that the public holiday for Eid for government institutions was going to be all of next week and I thought the card definitely wouldn't come before we went away. We prayed a lot about it these last few days, but I was still so surprised when we got the text on Tuesday evening saying it was on its way. The card arrived the next morning (and typically they don't arrive until 2-3 days after the text comes, so even that was speedy). So now we are all official and legal here until February 2019 or until we leave Istanbul!
Why am I telling you all this?
Firstly, it's an answer to prayer and I wanted to share that with you. Secondly, I wanted to give a little bit of an insight into how the process works here and why it is something that we ask for people to pray for.
But most importantly, God is good and that's something that S's ikamet arrival has led me to particularly reflect on this week. If I'm honest, of all the stresses I expected when coming here, the bureaucratic processes have taken up more mental energy than I thought they would. I don't tend to stress about the big things that could happen here (with the small exception of earthquakes sometimes...). I find it easy to believe that God is in control of the life-and-death big things.
But the small(er) things? Like appointment dates and paperwork and timings of post? God is in control of the smaller things too and sometimes it takes a bureaucratic process that I have no control over to remind me of that. That's not to say things will always work out easily and I have no idea what will happen with S's birth-certificate-document-thing. But our God is good and can be trusted with all things, big and small, and he is working them out for our good.
