On being a foreigner

As an auxiliar de conversación one of the necessary steps is obtaining your NIE, número de identificación de extranjeros, or your foreigner´s ID number. In order to do this, I have spent the past 5 hours in the oficina de extranjeros in Murcia.

Let me start from the beginning...

We left Águilas at 12:00 yesterday and arrived in Lorca, a city on the way to the regional capital of Murcia. In Lorca we stopped by the police station to see if we could get our NIE there, and we were redirected to the bus station and to Murcia. In Murcia we arrived at the ¨foreigner´s office¨ around 3:00 and were told that we had the wrong form and to come back the next day to wait in line to drop off the new form.

We stopped by a kebab restaurant next door to get some grub and we heard a woman screaming at the office. Everyone raced to the window to see the cops grabbing this Moroccan woman by the hair and beating her on the street. We still don´t know why exactly, except that in Spain Moroccans are treated much like Mexicans are in the United States: the high rates of immigration from Northern Africa has caused a sort of phobia of them. This did not make me feel comfortable about returning the following day.

Since we hadn´t planned on staying the night, I had to call up a friend so my two roommates and I could crash at her apartment. We got up this morning, stopped by the office of the program coordinator to get a new (and correct) version of a paper we thought was necessary for this whole process. Afterwards we headed back to the foreigner´s office for round two. The line to drop off the application was two blocks long, full of Bolivians, Ecuadorians, Moroccans and Algerians. When I finally arrived at the end of the line, of course they told me I should have gone through a different two-hour line, the one where you request your Student Resident´s Card. So I headed to line #2 and waited another hour. When I got to the end of this line, they of course told me that, no, in fact I should go back to the first line. Trying really hard not to cry I explained my situation in another way and they gave me a number and told me to take a seat in the waiting room. Line #3, except with seats. After another hour or two of waiting, our number was up. The man who took us informed us that we needed to get two more documents and come back to complete the process. Then, we´ll supposedly go back to Lorca and be done with it. When I asked him for his name as a reference for the next time we came back he told me, ¨we all work together, everyone here will tell you the same as I.¨ Viva España.