Dossier arrived! But...

Aida the lawyer called this afternoon to say that our dossier has arrived finally. Our whole dossier has been legalized, certified and notarized to within an inch of its life. The actual documents are scarcely legible under all those legal stamps.

But...turns out apostilling is another thing altogether.

Our google search for what the heck an apostille was turned up definitions such as:

• Is a method of certifying a document for use in another country pursuant to the 1961 Hague Convention.
• Process of legalizing adoption documents for the foreign country

Not much help really, as we assumed with all that stamping going on, that's what was being done. Never assume.

So now Aida sends me a link to the apostilling website, which gives specific contact details for where to get documents from NZ and South Africa apostilled. Ah, this would have helped three months ago!

http://www.hcch.net/index_en.php?act=conventions.authorities&cid=41

So I call up the NZ office, and they can issue me a new birth certificate and marriage certificate, and send it the correct government department for apostilling, and wait for my friend to go in to the office with her reference for us, to get that apostilled as well, and then courier them all to Mexico. Ahmed has to organize the South Africa one, which is trickier, as it involves extracting his handwritten birth certificate from our legally-bound dossier somehow, couriering it to South Africa and then back. It's another day before I can get in to Aida's office, with Maya in tow, to send his birth certificate on its merry journey back around the world, and it turns out I can't arrange and pay for the return trip at this end, so we'll have to call in a favour from one of Ahmed's relatives in living near Pretoria to arrange and pay for that for us.

Time is ticking on, and we are still not even at the offical starting point.