The First Week in Palmas

After a slow recovery from the gastroenteritis, we set about legalising my presence in Brazil. We seemed to spend most of the day driving from office building to office building, standing in queues and dealing with rude, dismissive civil servants.

We bounced from one office to the next, often being told to come back later or another day. Either the necessary person wasn’t there, or we didn’t have the appropriate documents, even though we had with us exactly what we were told to bring the last time.

Eventually we managed to get most things sorted. After 4 visits I was registered at the Federal Police that I will be living in Brazil and I arranged my ID card. I received my CPF (a kind of national insurance number in the UK, compulsory to have about your person). I also opened a bank account, leaning heavily on Sonia’s connections to fast-track what apparently is a longwinded and complex process.

Sonia repeatedly had to remind me that, while it all seemed unnecessarily complicated here, the UK has it’s own bureaucracies to deal with. This is true, and I can speak from experience that every country has their own bureaucratic idiosyncrasies that infuriate the foreigner, but it’s a reciprocal agreement. Visitors to the UK from Brazil claim the UK is complex, and vice versa, repeated across the world.

After 5 trips to the Ministry of Employment I still don’t have my “work card”. The last time we went, we arrived at 7.55am, ready for them to open at 8am. There were around 30 people outside. No queue though, as we are not in England. The doors opened at 8.15. Somehow in the pushing and shoving we got the 2^nd ticket. At this point they advised they only see 15 customers per morning. The other 15 mumbled and wandered home. A board outside advising of this is apparently not in anyone’s job description.

The one member of staff serving customers approached his desk at 8.25am to turn on his PC before making a coffee. He grunted for the first customer at around 8.35am.

When we got to see someone, the agent took one look at me and exclaimed:

“EEK! A foreigner! 

But Bruno is not here!”

We put aside the blatant assumption about my nationality, and her rather unprofessional observation. 

We focussed on her assumption that we should know who Bruno was, and why we need to speak to only him. Apparently he is the only one that can process foreigners, and he should have been there at 

8am. He wasn’t answering his phone. We were told to come back in the afternoon. Sonia complained vocally to the blank, disinterested face of the agent, and we left. 

I still don’t have my work card.