the speechless customs chief officer
We arrived on December 3, 2017 in Sibiu, Romania and went to the customs office here in Sibiu the next day in the belief that the truck with all our things will be quickly released. But nothing of the sort, the response from the customs authorities shocked us deeply - our transport does not yet exist "customs technically" ...
When we were planning our move from Switzerland to Sibiu, the Romanian transport office assured us that transportation from our own household was not a problem and anyway Cristina is a Romanian citizen. We shouldn't worry, they have already done many such transports.
But the just the day before moving to Romania, the transport office called us and said „there is a problem“, they did not know that Switzerland is not a member of the EU and therefore they do not know what is happening at the border.
However we decided to do everything as planned. But at the customs office in Sibiu we were told that this transport was not registered and that we did not have a valid "customs case number" ans without this number nothing will work. Further they said, it could take between 10 days and 3 weeks before the transport was released because of this instance. In addition, Cristina's Romanian passport was expired and it should take at least 10 days to renew it. That was a bleak outlook just before the holidays. Our entire “belongings” were in this transport, which was not released by customs. We felt like the people of Israel before the Red Sea. We were in all possible offices but it was an almost hopeless „bureaucracy chaos“, nobody wanted to meet us in our predicament.
Very discouraged and somewhat worn down, we decided, as it is in the Bible, to boldly come to the thorn of God, as it is described in Hebrews 4. We knew that we had done everything we could and gave up all of our burden in God's hands and tried to sleep.
The next morning the passport office called first and said that they had made a temporary passport for Cristina that could be picked up right now. Less than 24 hours earlier, we were told that there was no “express variant” in the case of Cristina. An hour later we received an other call from the customs office in another city, which is responsible for assigning this "customs case number". One of the officers asked us briefly about the type and purpose of the transport and whether we wanted to sell the things, and then she just said "okay". After about an hour we had received this "customs case number" by email and went again to the customs office here in Sibiu together with our "giant dossier“ of documents. The officials checked our documents with great skepticism, since they had told us the day before how long it „should take" before the transport could be released. Our dossier was checked almost “endlessly”, even the chief of the customs office was called in. He finally said: “I've been here on duty for over 17 years and it has NEVER happened that such a complex case was resolved in less than two days. Who are you guys and how did it work? The answer was simple, we just have a great God who does miracles. Our transport was opened, briefly checked and RELEASED - HALLELUJA Praise God!
It was a very sobering experience to "own nothing" for three days than the clothes you wear. In my whole life I was never so blessed and touched to unload a moving truck!