(posted by him)

So in an earlier post, I gave you a little preview into the “fun” it is applying for visa’s to enter Sweet Girl’s country. In her country, you must be invited to come via a formal invitation. This invitation allows you to get a visa from the local consulate. And there are two types of visas (though law is currently changing this as we speak), a tourist visa, good for a double or single entry in a 30 day window, and a business visa, that can be gotten for multiple entries over a long period of time. Up to this point, we have been traveling on tourist visa’s as they are easy and simple to get (your invitation can come from any travel agency or hotel abroad). The business visa, in our case for adoption, must include an invitation from the adoption ministry… much harder to obtain. Since our court appearance over a month ago, we have been working to obtain this invitation. We wanted me to travel on a multiple entry business visa recently for trip #3, but the invitation arrived a day late and dollar short, so I traveled on another tourist visa. Why so important? Well, first off, a multiple entry business visa would have saved us money over multiple single entry tourist ones, but that’s not the main point. The main point is the passport office in Sweet Girl’s hometown requires that we be traveling on a business visa when we come to pick up her passport during the final trip. Without it, we may not be allowed to get her passport and thus not be able to bring her home.So, whats the quarrel? Well, first a little background. We had asked about our business invitations when we were there for court, end of August, and a few days later were told they would be ready by Sept 12th. Well, Sept 12th came and went, and Vita called everyday, but the invitations where still not ready and no one knew the problem. Well, this turned into the situation I wrote about preparing for trip #3…the long and short of it is, the invitation was ready on Sept 24th, but not in enough time for me to turn it around into a visa in time for trip #3. Vita had sent us a scanned copy of the invitation, and we noticed something odd while looking at them. Her’s appeared to have been dated Sept 12th, as originally promised, but mine appeared to be filled out differently/at a different time and was dated Sept 24th. We concluded that there was some breakdown in communication and they had only issued Her’s and forgot mine, and then had to scramble to add mine when we started calling everyday. But we thought the worst of it was behind us.Well, when I returned from trip #3, we knew trip #4 was imminent, and wanted to go ahead and apply for our business visa since they are good for 90-days (instead of 30 like the tourist). So we once again sent off our passports to our travel agent in Seattle to apply for them, this time not needing to pay for as much extra rush processing. But then I get a call last night, there is a problem with my visa application, the consulate has rejected it. When any agency in Sweet Girl’s country issues a visa invitation, they record it in a computer system the consulate uses to look up the invitation. This saves us from having to pay the $150 in shipping to get the one piece of paper here physically. But, the adoption ministry in Sweet Girl’s home town that issued me my invitation, miskeyed a number into the online system so there is a mismatch between the actual invitation and the electronic registration. Now the consulate is saying they won’t issue my visa without either a.) the original copy of the invitation (which we hope Vita physically has) or b.) the office that issued the invitation can correct the typo in the online system. Either way, its gonna take at least a week to sort out and I may not get my visa with enough time to travel the 3rd week of October (the soonest Sweet Girl’s passport would be ready). Her invitation, the one issued on the original promised date,  is of course fine, she’ll get her visa.

Once again, what we thought surely would be simple and we had plenty of time for has turned into a debacle and will probably push things right to the edge again. It might not be possible to go get her the third week of October (10 days!) like we want/plan. It’s possible that the passport wouldn’t even be ready then. But it’s pushing us to push the pickup trip date out to the 2nd week in November. This would ensure that we’d have time to deal with the visa and ensure the passport would be ready. It sounds sensible, but it means our Sweet Girl would be without her family a few extra days that she doesn’t absolutely have to be… something we’ve tried to avoid all along.