"General Communications Incorporated, this is Judy, how can I help you?"

"Er, is this the number I am supposed to call if I want to buy a phone in my house?" 

"Yes! Do you want to keep your existing number or open a new line?"

"I do not have a phone number in the United States, so I think a new line?" 

"What is your address?"

"I do not have a final one yet, my friend is looking for houses to rent here, I just want to know how buying a phone would go and how much it would cost." 

"It's sixty bucks for installation and then twelve a month, for the cheapest plan."

"Right. Should I call you again when I have a house address?" 

"Yes. Did I get you everything you needed today?"

Nayoki is so confused. "Er, no, but I was going to call different phone numbers or go to stores for the other things I needed today." 

There is a heavy sigh on the other end of the line. "Have a great day and thanks for calling General Communications Incorporated."

It's really frustrating that mindreading doesn't work over phones! She has no idea why he's annoyed with her. 

Nayoki Mindspeaks the Andalite hanging back in the shuttle again, to say that she knows how to get a phone once they've figured out how to get an address to put it - or it might already have one, the librarian said something implying that, in which case she thinks it would be less money. 

Should she try to call about Matirin's newspaper ad or does he want to do it with the pay phone? 

He will try himself, using a pay phone seems like an important skill for many of them to have picked up. 

After fifteen frustrating minutes he manages to place a call and place his newspaper ad, only to learn from the newspaper ad person that it is conventional to list an address or phone number at which interested applicants can contact you, and doesn't make a lot of sense to run an ad without that. He promises to come back once he has such an address.

And they can set themselves to figuring out how to rent a house! 

Nayoki has several ideas to approach it. In one of the TV shows there was a board with announcements on it that was plot relevant, so if anyone's seen those, they might have announcements of people who want to rent out houses? Or people who want to rent out houses might have their own newspaper ads, even! She can also go ask someone at the city hall or the library if neither of those gives them any leads. 

It transpires that people who want to rent out houses do post newspaper ads, sometimes, and they can go and tour the houses and fill out lease applications. This requires forging more documents and providing 'references', apparently phone numbers of people who will testify that they know you and you will take good care of the houses. Maybe Nayoki can offer to pay more in exchange for skipping the 'references' part since her cover story explains why she would have none? And then once they have phone numbers they can serve as references for the additional houses they'll need to acquire in cities with Yeerks.

Nayoki cheerfully bluffs her way through all of these steps and mostly has fun doing so, occasionally taking breaks to shove English knowledge into other Velgarth natives' brains. Incidentally in the process, she meets (well, mindreads) a girl who's a student from Canada, a fact granted to her by some small talk with a store clerk about her foreign origins. She has one of the mages who also has Fetching pickpocket the girl's passport for the Andalites to work from; she knows her address so can 'find' it later. Hopefully that plus an actual real non-suspicious phone bill will get her a bank account! 

Leareth finishes giving his people trainings on Earth customs and the limits of their orders for working independently, and asks the Andalites to shuttle-deliver them to the cities he's now listed. They won't start looking for houses until they're confirm they can do that without standing out; in the meantime they can either camp behind illusions on the edge of town or pretend to be homeless people, apparently there are a lot of homeless people who sleep on the streets. Leareth thinks this is very egregious for a civilization with as much technology and abundance as theirs. 

Possibly the insistence that you need 'references' for houses is contributing. 

A weird number of people do not want to rent to Nayoki regardless of her references because of her skin color (they do not say this, but they think it) but among the ones who do not feel that way one can eventually be persuaded to overlook her lack of references in exchange for more money. WIth a phone number and an address and a convincing passport she can get a legitimate bank account, into which they can arrange periodic slightly less legitimate wire transfers!

(Matirin is worried that the Yeerks are in some other country and fairly little of this arduous bootstrapping will even transfer, but he's done some research and the United States seem to be a reasonable place for Yeerks to begin their evil work? They are the most powerful collection of states ever since their counterpart on the other continent fell apart for unclear reasons a few years ago.)

Once they have an address he runs his newspaper ad for emergency medicine doctors and nurses who want to work in a remote part of Alaska in exchange for $12,000/month, minimum one year contract, town does not have phone or internet access.

They get a call the next day! "Hi, uh, my name is Marian, I'm calling about the contract for the nursing job, I wanted to, uh, ask how many years of experience you need for it." 

The Andalite manning the phone does not know that but says in reasonably good English "uh, let me just look that up for you" and then frantically demands an answer from the collective expertise of everyone in the underground base. 

Leareth pings his Healers for this and it's reported that a year seems like the minimum and more would be ideal, but they've put together that people go to a sort of Collegium system to train as doctors and presumably nurses, here, and possibly someone who did it recently would be good. They can probably be flexible? They'll have to see how many applications they get to know if they can be fussy. 

"Uh, minimum one year of experience," the Andalite at the phone says, "but that's flexible because it's not very popular, since it's in the middle of nowhere."

The girl on the phone makes a startled nonplussed sound and then says 'uh' and then: "I have almost ten months experience, is that worth applying? ...Also my nursing license is from Canada, so I need to know if you can do travel visa paperwork." 

Shoot how many months are there in a year. Presumably it is more than nine or the question would be contextually bizarre? "I think it's worth applying?" he says uncertainly. "It's good if you graduated from your collegium recently because there are new techniques, in medicine. ...we can do travel visa paperwork." 

"All right, thank you, uh, how do I apply? The ad didn't, uh, say whether to mail things. I have all my information here though."