driver's license drama

Today we begin the process of getting our Ecuadorian driver's licenses.  We've had a car for about 3 months now, so I imagine it's a good idea to have a valid license, but we've managed to get by without one thus far.... so I haven't been in any major rush to do it.  Supposedly you're allowed to drive on a valid American license indefinitely, which is what we've been doing, but Andy's worried that if we got into an accident or something we'd be more likely to get into major trouble. Here accidents are a BIG deal.  Tiny fender bender? Jail time.  Most of the time if people have an accident, they are quick to resolve it without anyone calling the police because if the cops get involved, you're going directly to jail or you're paying a huge bribe.  Needless to say, if gringos (white, non-ecuadorians) got in an accident with no Ecuadorian license, it would cost us a fortune.   Thus, it's license time.

It seems like this country makes electricity or something from paper because it's the life-blood of the government.  They want papers and copies of every document you could possibly imagine.  The more papers and stamps and seals you have, the more official it is.  We Americans have a saying about the Ecuadorian way of doing things... "Solo un papel mas!"  "Just one more paper!"
But, hopefully we have all our papers in order because we'll take them to the transit authority today, and they will send the papers to Quito (6 hrs away), where they'll take about 3 weeks to determine if we need more copies, etc. before we can take the written driving test.  If anything is lacking from our mountain of documents it will take another three weeks to get it approved, and so on.  The downside of this process is that every individual working for the government has a different idea of what documents you actually need because the laws change so frequently here. To top it all off, this can change based on whether or not they're having a bad day, or if they simply don't like you. So, you can imagine this could be a very long process.

Basically, pray for us! We're going to need it...