an advocate

I love living in Spain, but being a foreigner here I frequently find myself feeling a little lost - like when I don't get the punchline of a joke yet I smile and chuckle anyway, or when I think about choosing a school for Abigail in two years: private or public, Catholic or not, more gallego or less gallego. . . but the place where I feel the most out of sorts is anything involving the government. Mostly because it is a completely different system, and then we're foreigners in this completely different system and so the processes we go through are different those of our Spanish friends. And then to top it all off, all of the official government publications here in Galicia are in Gallego. Legalese is intimidating for me in English, pretty complicated for me in Spanish and near indecipherable in Gallego. All of this adds up to a certain level of anxiety for me whenever I have dealings with the government and ultimately makes me want to avoid it whenever we can. Plus, I have this neurotic fear that if we totally screw up our paperwork that we'll get kicked out of Spain.

Which leads me up to last week. We've been in Spain for over 5 years and still had some unanswered questions about living here as foreigners. Somehow some of our questions came up in conversation with my good friend Betty and last week she went with me to speak to a lawyer for foreigners who could actually answer my questions. And since then she has traipsed all over the city with me the past four mornings from office to office providing moral support as I collected information and filled out forms.

We didn't do anything that I couldn't have done on my own, except that I couldn't have done it on my own. I would have gotten frustrated and put it off another six months to five years and continued to miss out. I needed an advocate - someone to support me and back me and walk with me when I was unsure.

The last four mornings have made me realize how thankful I am that God created us to be in relationship with each other. That we don't have to walk through life alone and when we hit a rough spot or get all tangled up in red tape we're there for each other.

To her I'm sure it didn't seem like much, but thanks to Betty I'm a little less intimidated by stamp wielding bureaucrats.