A year later
In April 2008, I wrote a blog post about our beginning steps to creating our business, Distributed Expertise. It has been a long time coming to wade through the bureaucratic maze of Argentine tax offices, bank accounts and immigration offices. We are not completely done yet, but we are officially employees of our company and received our first paychecks! It has been quite a struggle, a lot of learning and a large serving of patience. Business is done very differently here in Argentina and I have to come to grips with that and not expect my normal routines to work. We came to Argentina to learn a new language and get a clue about life outside of the United States of America. I am certainly getting a clue-by-four as to how people cope and often, don’t cope, with the bureaucratic webs and catch-22s that you have to go through.
One thing I have learned is that trust is not something that is given automatically. You have to earn that. You have to prove yourself, sometimes over and over and over.
Another thing is that, at least with many of the people we work with here, email is not the preferred method of communication. Personal relationships are important and the small talk that can be made either in person or on the phone take precedence over the impersonal efficiency of email.
There is a word in Castellano that does not exist in English: trámite. This means that you have an application in the bureaucratic process. For example, our residency request is still in trámite with the immigration office. We’re not done yet, and we handed our paperwork in in December, 2008.
Patience is needed here. As many people can attest, efficiency is not common here. It seems like in the past year some systems have been put in place that will make things run faster and smoother. Some appointments can be made online, but for many others you have to go to the office and pull your number and wait, sometimes for hours. I am learning the very important 3-Ps – patience, persistence and persuasion. This is how things work.
Tags: bureaucracy, lessons, patience
bureaucracy, lessons | beatrice 2009-05-19
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By Cate, 2009-05-20 @ 01:01
yeah to the 3 p’s!!! learn them well. Congrats too…no small achievement you and Kragen Javier have earned.