Ministry of Interior - Passports Update

I was able to do six interviews at MOI on Friday morning. :-)

That office is the hardest working Haitian government office. They come to work punctually and work all the way through their lunchtime most of the days. This is not how many other offices work in Haiti. I also saw the Director of Political Affairs who has been very polite and friendly toward me.

During that time, I had a chance to speak with Madame Duret. I told her that I have been receiving emails from adoptive families whose children's files have been in MOI for a while. Madame Duret told me that many times, orphanages drop off the files at the Immigration office for MOI approval, the files are sent to her office and then the files just sit there because orphanage representatives do not come to do the "interview".

Also, she said that the turn-around time of a file where the interview has been done and there are no mistakes in the file is around one month or less. She said that the files that are "stuck" in MOI are the files where a document needs to be corrected. It is not up to MOI to get the documents corrected but it is up to the orphanage to get the document corrected and turned back in.

For example, an Archive document for the birth certificate can have a typo on it. This kind of mistake is not the orphanage's fault, but the Archive official's fault who typed the document. However, it needs to get corrected, the corrected document has to be submitted and then the file can be signed out. A mistake like that can delay the file for several months.