Where is a cop when you need one?

Where is a cop when you need one? Pulling over Marcel! For the second time in three months, Marcel has been pulled over. The cops tried three other times but it was unsafe to do so, so he kept driving. Because of smog problems in the Federal District, the government introduced a law that restricts driving your vehicle by one day a week (hence the reason everybody has an older, more polluting second vehicle to use during that day). The last number of your license plate will determine which day of the week one may not drive. Our license plate ends with a seven; thus, we can't drive on Tuesdays. Unfortunately, the police take advantage of this very convolluted law to pull over foreign vehicles and try to "fine" people for circulating on Fridays; the reason I was pulled over. People are often threatened with large "fines" or even seizure of the vehicle. Fortunately, we have made ourselves quite familiar with the law and we also threaten that we will call our boss, who is Mexican, so that the police can explain the law to him and can thus better translate for us the problem. At this point, the police suddenly have a change of heart and let us go. A missionary with another missions agency told me he threatens to call his embassy and they immediately let him go. I am so grateful for the better policing we find in the US and Canada.

I should note the picture above was not the police officer that pulled me over. The picture above was taken by an old college friend, Claus, who quickly snapped this photo of one of the youths from Killaloe, Ontario.

After our police incident, we went home and did a second day of paper work: filling out forms for our Mexican visas, expense forms, embassy registration forms and doing change of address forms. Desk work is boring but a necessary part of our job.