Collard Wanderings

Temporarily Out Of The Country

It's been an interesting few days. We have been working for a while on our visa process. This involves many hours of preparing, translating documents, and many hours of standing in line at the state police department. We have been fortunate in that our teammates and a lawyer we work with have been also doing a major part of this work.

Anyway, it all culminated in a long session at the police department on Wednesday. To summarize, we found out we need to leave the country immediately until our process has been finalized. Initially we were told this would take 3 months, but fortunately that has come way down and it should be a matter of weeks.

Soo...we immediately called our friends Dave & Melissa in Budapest and asked if we could come stay with them. This is now the plan. However, we were delayed by one day because I woke up yesterday morning with the flu. This was right before we had to go with our lawyer to an appointment at another police department in the morning. It was quite difficult, but we all managed to go and keep our appointment.

The good news is that this is just a temporary matter, and we don't think there will be any problem with getting our visa. When I think about it objectively, it's not a big deal - a matter of finding somewhere to be and something to do for a few weeks. On the other hand, we were both kind of emotionally stunned by the whole thing.

This happened the day before our planned team retreat. We all had plane tickets already purchased, as well as an apartment reserved for all of us. Once we left the station, we went to the airline office to see if we could get our tickets refunded, and we were successful. We also have two more weeks of language school still to go, which we will have to forego. Amy's final was actually that same evening, and I'm very impressed that with the stress of sitting through various interviews and lines at the police all day, she still went and did very well on her final test that evening. Unfortunately, I will have to miss my final exam (bummer, right?). We were also invited to participate in a week-long youth festival that's an outreach to students - we will have to pass on this as well.

So, now we're adjusting. I keep reminding myself that this is temporary, because it doesn't feel like it sometimes!-) We're packing up the car, then we have to go back one more time to the station this morning, and then make the 5 hour drive to Budapest. Praise God that we have good friends in another country just a drive away! We actually had several possibilities - when we were told we needed to leave we had to quickly find options. Our teammates had contacts in Sarajevo, Bosnia that were willing to take us, we have colleagues in Slovenia, and we have several friends in Budapest. So initially we'll go to Budapest, and then see what happens. We're also hoping this won't take near as long as we've been told.

Updates to come...

posted by Greg @ 9:44 PM