First, sorry for not being able to post yesterday. We had to get fingerprinted in the morning and the plan was afterwards to update this website before heading to Siem Reap for a deaf youth camp. But it turned out the whole morning was spent with the fingerprints so that I had no time to do anything before heading north to the camp.
A recent directive from the Ministry of Social Affairs said that all the Maryknoll project directors need to get a criminal record check. Probably that is the result of international NGOs pushing against the trafficking and abuse of children here.
I thought it would take maybe 15-30 minutes for the seven of us to be printed but it took 2 1/2 hours. We had to fill out a form for the Cambodian police at the Ministry of the Interior and that took a while because they wanted all our heights in centimeters, etc., and then eventually we each were fingerprinted twice.
The original plan was that we would get fingerprinted and then we would send the copies of the print and our payment to the FBI in Washington, DC., they would do a criminal check, and then send us a record of their findings which we could submit to MOSVY. But it turns out that the police here have some sort of working arrangement with the FBI and the US Embassy so the time spent on all the paperwork was to send that to Washington for us. We had to pay $30 each for that, plus $2.50 for new photos, but if we understood correctly what they were telling us, we don’t have to do anything more.
