We're still on the first one... well actually, we regressed.
Last Wednesday, we got an email from our school saying that as they were handing over our paperwork to the government, they were informed that Daniel and I need to get physicals before the government will accept our résumés. Not only that, but the physicals need to be done by a doctor/hospital that has been approved by the Chinese consulate in Chicago. Our boss emailed the Chinese consulate for names of the acceptable doctors/hospitals in Indiana as soon as she found out, but Daniel and I figured that they wouldn't respond for a while. We tried calling their office, but we couldn't get through to anybody. So we called another branch of the consulate, and talked to a receptionist who gave us his very unofficial, but still welcomed conjecture: try a big-name hospital.
Without further ado, Daniel and I took off to the hospital here in town. They were willing to give us a physical that very day; we were afraid that we would have to set up an appointment for a later date since we had to get a chest X-ray, an EKG, and blood work done, but they were happy to help us. The people at the hospital were so kind and willing to work with us, including the nurse whom we had to beg to notarize the form.
A little background information: We thought we had to have the form notarized because we had to send it off to get an apostille from the Indiana secretary of state. We had to get an apostille because we had to send it off to the consulate in Chicago to get a "great seal," which approves it for use in China. Without those, the government cannot accept the physical... or so we thought.
When we got the paperwork back from the hospital the next day, we had it notarized, then scanned everything into our computer and sent the digital copies to our school just on the off chance that the local government would accept the paperwork without the great seal from the consulate. We went ahead and sent the hard copies to the Indiana secretary of state to get the apostille. Of course we paid the big bucks for express mail, because we were worried about the timing of everything. We were counting on the secretary of state taking a week to get the apostille back to us, and then about two weeks at the consulate. Then we would have had to send everything to China so that we could finally get our physicals and résumés approved. Then who knows how long it would be before we got our Letters of Invitation (LOIs). There was a very real possibility that we wouldn't be able to arrive in China until after the school year started.
But the good news is that God answers prayers. On Friday, two days after we first found out about all this mess, we got an email from the school again saying that the local government accepted our un-consulate-approved physicals! So now they are going through all of our paperwork, step one of the process.
It looks like we're all set to get our LOIs, but we were informed this morning that we will need a background check before arriving in China. When our school first took the paperwork to the local government, they told us there was no need for a background check. I guess things have changed within the past four or five days, and now we do need them. We already have extended criminal background checks for the school we worked for here in Indiana, and we sent a copy of those to the school. Our hope is that the local government will accept those without the great seal from the consulate; if they need the great seal, then we will need to get fingerprinted again so that the Indiana state police can notarize it, so that we can get the apostille, so that we can get the great seal... so on and so forth.
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