My Published Articles for ViewsHound: A Day at the Philippine Consulate in San Francisco

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

A Day at the Philippine Consulate in San Francisco

Yesterday, I was at the Philippine Consulate in San Francisco getting my signature authenticated and notarized for a Special Power of Attorney (SPA) documents for the Philippines. It was not a very bad experience as I expected based on what I read in the Internet. The actual time I was in the Consulate was from 10AM to 2PM with a 30 minutes lunch break. However, I spent the whole day for this, because of the horrendous traffic from Sacramento to San Francisco. I hired a personal driver and her car(135), paid the gas(40), tolls(11), lunch break(44) and Parking(18). My total cost was about $250.

We left Sacramento at 7AM via HW50. It took us 45 minutes to reach I-80 and we encountered another traffic jam at UC Davis, in spite of driving in the carpool lane. Traffic was smooth until we reached the Pinole area. It took us another 45 minutes to cross the Oakland/SFO bridge. We arrived at the consulate at 10AM. While my driver was parking I formed my line at the guard to present 2 ID's before I was allowed to the 2nd floor of the Consulate Building at 447 Sutter Street. You have to take a number prior to your entry to the office. Since I am a Senior Citizen I got a C number( 67) supposed to be a courtesy number and separated from the general public. C numbers are given to Senior citizens, the Handicapped, pregnant women and women with small children. I love this idea.

There were 5 other senior Citizens ahead of me. While waiting for my turn, I got to "small talk" to three other seniors. We talk about the traffic, paper work required, the Internet and about dual citizenships. Two of them came from Stockton and the other from Fairfield. One of the senior citizens needs her passport renewed and did not have her paper work. I told them the forms are available for download at the Consulate web site. The other senior commented, so you are one of those rare seniors who uses the Internet! I smiled without any comment.

I went out of the waiting room and found out that most of the forms are available in front of the Office, but you need to have it copied. The Consulate has a Copy Machine that charge 0.25c per copy using quarters and one dollar bills.

I waited for another 30 minutes until my number was called. My SPA papers were examined, dated and I provided 6 copies of my driver license as my ID, indicating that I personally appeared at the Consulate on September 18, 2018. I was out and ready for the Cashier on the 6th Floor by around 11:45AM. I had 4 SPA's notarized and each SPA cost $25. I was told the documents will be ready for pickup from 1 to 2PM. By this time the lines were overflowing the waiting room area was full and dozens of seniors are now in the Hallways. I am glad I came early.

My personal driver and I had a leisurely lunch at a restaurant two blocks from the Consulate Building. It was a very expensive lunch costing me $44 plus $8 tip.

After lunch I decided to go back to the Consulate, since I needed information and forms for Dual citizenship for my son, who was born here in the US. He was born before we become US citizens. Is he qualified to apply? The forms for Dual Citizenship in the web applies to those originally born in the Philippines and need to reacquire their citizenship.

I look around for a Consulate employee with authority. I found one supervising the examining clerks at the counters. I know he is a Supervisor and may be able to give me my answer and the correct forms. I was correct. The supervisor gave me 2 forms not found in the web as follows:

1. Affidavit of Delayed Registration of Birth
2. Report of Birth

Supporting Documents that my son needed are: His birth Certificate, Our Naturalization Papers and Marriage Certificate. Our Naturalization Papers will show that we were still Filipino Citizens when he was born. Now I know that all my 4 children are eligible for Filipino dual citizenships if they want it. For Benefits and Advantages of dual citizenship read:

https://lifeinus1960present.blogspot.com/2013/06/advantages-of-dual-citizenship-phl-and.html

The above information was useful. I also learned that all dual citizens application is by appointment only beginning last September 4.

At 1PM, I went to the Releasing Documents Window to give my pick-up stub. It was at 1:50PM that my name was called and all the 4 SPA's were done. My driver and I hurriedly went to the Union Square Parking Garage, so we could get out of the city before the afternoon rush hour starts. We arrived in Sacramento around 5PM, accomplished but very tired. My legs were starting to cramp for seating in the car for almost three hours each way. Thank you to my personal driver. You were a good driver and I will ride with you anytime without fear.

All in All, my experience at the consulate was not bad at all. Creating the Courtesy Line for Seniors is an excellent idea. The clerk that checked my papers was friendly and helpful. The supervisor that gave me the 2 forms for my son's dual citizenship application was formal and informative. If you have business with the Consulate come as early as you can: Office Hours: MF is from 9 to 4 PM.

No comments:

Guest Article from Susan Creamer Joy

In The Silence, by Susan Creamer Joy.

Today's guest article is from Susan Creamer Joy. Susan is one of my favorite authors in the ViewsHound community. Susan writes, draws, paints and cobbles together art from found objects making a variety of creations from jewelry to religious shrines. She frequently sports burns on her fingers from her soldering iron, paint on her palms and ink under her fingernails, but her hair is usually combed. When she is not losing time in the creative vortex of her studio, she is likely to be putting her knowledge of metaphysics and esoteric principles including Tarot, numerology, astrology and graphology to good use in consultations. Her children are grown, her husband still works and her four dogs believe she needs serious help. The title of her article is "A Matter Of Love And Death". Thank you Susan.

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up – my stomach ratcheted in the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew that my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother unnaturally clutched at the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

As the wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw, all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I’d written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk across the room awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the middle of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference. All that night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed reasonable only for the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris had been girding his pacifist sensibilities preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent. I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl’s school – missing him – and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned, and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

But in spite of our discomfort, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters: Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon. It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have had nothing.

Chris was learning to fly. I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams. Of course, as with all progress, there was the positive element: We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Now, without pretense, both healthy cognition and sincere motivation surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes. I even did my homework.

No longer was I escaping today but, instead, living for my day of escape. Lying still in the dark of my room, I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching and looked to the floor and to my history book half hidden beneath the nightstand where I’d tossed it the night before. Even in this early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the bubble-formed letters that spelled C H R I S in soft, juvenile curves on the torn book cover I’d fashioned out of a brown paper grocery bag.

I vaguely remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily. I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would and glancing at the clock, I noted it was nine-twenty-three. Why that mattered I had no way of knowing in that strange moment, but within hours, it would be one I would never forget; and although I was becoming drowsy and still needed to finish my work, I felt beyond reason that my letter to him could not wait.

So, I wrote. I would always write. I would always be there. He would always be there.“Suzi."It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother, although weighted and slow, her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi.” She said it again, this time with sharp gravity, like a chisel against stone.

As if on cue, I leaned forward, flanked now by my parents who were sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them. I don’t know how. I didn’t know why. The lights in my room remained off, but it seemed that the darkness clung more to them than to me, as though they were holding it there – away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment. They were crying. My father was crying. My father. “Suzi. We have something very, very bad to tell you." Chris has been in a car accident." And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it. f there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in. And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to? Who am I going to love?” I wailed. Who will love me? In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that – there was no after that. After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for years to come. A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting. To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything. It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

Many years later, at 25 years-old and in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child, and after a decade of forgetting, I remembered. I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in the same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me – his great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us; bequeathed as I have been, with a determination to fly from a boy whose ragged fate precluded that dream.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time. If it has any intention of coming for this one, it will have to go through me. And trust me, it will be in for one hell of a fight.

Note: If you enjoy this article, please let me know.

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

A Day at the Philippine Consulate in San Francisco

No comments:

Post a Comment

Linkwithin