On top of taking care of a new born and adjusting our lives to the changes, we had to go through the Moroccan and American governments to get Norah to be a US citizen. We also had another motive... we bought tickets for France for Christmas and we wouldn't be able to leave Morocco without a passport for Norah.
The first hurdle was to get the official Moroccan birth certificate. In order to do this we needed to find our Birth Certificates and Marriage lisence. Once we found them we had to wait till the Moroccan government wasn't on strike. They hadn't been paid for quite a while so they would go on strike several days a week. They were open one day that week, with the help of Simo (the Moroccan at RAS who knows how to get paperwork pushed through the Moroccan government) sent Marc to some office buildings. After the woman at the desk complained that our Marriage Certificate was in English (I started to explain that Marriage Certificate is Certificate de Mariage in French - not too different but I just listen to her complain). She refused to put down Norah Christine Iwanski-Dysart because the forms wouldn't allow it. So our daughter's name is officially Norah Christine Dysart. After two hours of filling out forms in Arabic and French (by hand) everything was ready ... except for the signature. The proper signature was done by a man on the other side of town. Since the Eid was the next day we had to wait another week. We eventually got the birth certificate signed. Her official birth certicate is a sheet of paper written by hand.
The next was getting passport photos which was difficult to find the time. Then we drove to Casablanca to the US consolate with Norah to submit the paper work. It was Norah's first big trip (an hour each way). The paper work seemed fine and we were able to submit everything in 45 minutes. We have to go back to Casa to pick up the passports before we leave for France next week.
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