Visa Fiasco

As an update to all of you following, I have hit a massive bureaucratic brick wall of incompetency at the Embassy of Ghana. Here's the low down.

I applied for my visa to Ghana about 2 months ago, and since then I have pretty much just been waiting around to receive that visa. After waiting around for about 6 weeks (they say it should take between 2-5 weeks to process), I started trying to contact the embassy to find out what point in the process my visa was at. Since then I have emailed and more recently called their offices about 20 times. In the entire time I have been calling, I have spoken to real live individuals 4 times, and I have left about twice as many voice messages on their answering machines. I have waited over the phone in a queue for up to 30 minutes trying to speak to someone only to be transferred to a voice-mail system after my long wait. Needless to say, the past few days have been both frustrating and infuriating. With the current countdown, my plane leaves the United States in 7 1/2 days. Currently, my passport (which I had to send with the application) and visa are lost in the ether contained in the Ghanaian Embassy in DC.

I have had to contact other offices in DC just in order have someone with some power try to find out where my application and passport have ended up. I'm am currently just waiting on that information. If they cannot find the package, I will have to go home immediately and make a trip to DC in order to apply for a new passport (paying another arm and a leg to get the process expedited) and then applying for a new visa (getting that expedited as well) so that just maybe I can still leave on August 4th for Ghana. In the mean time, I am hoping against hope that it can be found so that I won't have to pay all that extra money and so that I won't have to pick up and leave Fairmont right away.

So, for now, I am waiting on information, and trying to be as ready as I can be to leave Fairmont this evening. Which basically entails a huge list of this including all of my packing, packing whatever things Ross left at the apartment, making arrangements with both of my jobs, with financial aid at Fairmont State, and the head of the Honors department. Not to mention, rearranging a doctor's appointment, leaving instructions and a package for the new President of APO, and making sure I clean out my stuff from the apartment to get everything in storage. I just have a feeling it's gonna be a loooooong day.