Visa Woes, Rhinos, and Snow

These photos begin with a view of the snow-capped Himalayas as seen from Kathmandu. This is followed by a Buddhist shrine, two monkeys were picking up grains of rice offered at the shrine. The next are of rhinos and other animals in the Chitwan Park. Others are snow photos taken in the eastern US. The final one is our grandchildren Ivan and Annie with their mother Stacy.


The visa woes began about 15 months after our arrival in India in 2007 when we discovered that the Foreign Relations Office in Delhi would not renew our employment visas. We had to make a trip home to get new ones from the Indian embassy in the US. Things gradually went downhill from there.

It would be hard to calculate the hours that Ruth and I (as well as the MCC Asia Department) spent on the visa problems in the past two years as we attempted to traverse this bureaucratic maze. The local Foreign Relations Office in Kolkata tried to be helpful but had one version of what was needed. The Indian embassy in Washington, DC had another version. And the main Foreign Relations Office in New Delhi felt like a black hole.

Things got even more complicated during home leave last summer when our application to switch to five-year business visas was denied. We returned to India knowing that we’d have to figure out something else when our present visas expired early in 2010. Then someone at MCC came up with the bright idea of having us courier our documents and passports to the MCC office in the US and have them work on it for us while we stayed in Asia. Apparently this had worked before present global security concerns.

One little hitch was that I needed to leave India and surrender my foreign registration booklet. We decided that I’d go to Nepal in December to follow up on some of our peace projects there while I sent my stuff to the US and waited on a new visa. I left Kolkata on December 14, handed in my booklet to Indian immigration, flew into Kathmandu, got a taxi, and headed straight to the nearest DHL office.

The man behind the desk looked at me a rather strangely when I told him I wanted to send my passport to the US. He called his supervisor who told me that it was illegal to courier a US passport across an international border and that it would be seized by US customs. Okay, we’re not doing that! But now I was in Nepal with no way to get back into India. The ground kept shifting beneath my feet.

Some hasty emails and phone calls set our next plan of action. Filipinos have a wonderful expression for times like this—bahala na! (happen what may). It includes a sense of resignation with a determination to make the best of it. That’s when Ruth and I decided to go see the rhinos. I could meet with our Nepal peace partners in the next week, Ruth would join me in Nepal, we’d hang out with friends on Christmas day, and then we’d head to the Royal National Chitwan Park for a week to see the wild animals. As you can see from the photos, we had a wonderful time.

Ruth went back to Kolkata after the New Year to work at the annual budget. I followed up on some other Nepal related matters and also worked long-distance at India project planning. Near the end of January, we both flew to the US to submit our applications for new visas. After the hassle of getting all the new documentation that is now required, we submitted everything several days later. (We panicked a bit when we were told that they now need copies of our birth certificates and we couldn’t remember where we had stored them more than two years ago).

Then it started snowing—we absolutely loved it! It seemed so fitting on top of everything else. First, we got snowed in at our daughter Krista’s house outside Washington DC. We got two feet of snow, turning the park behind her house into a winter wonderland. The next week we got snowed in again with another foot of snow in Lancaster, PA. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

Now we’re in a holding pattern until our visas arrive. Two weeks of waiting have slipped into four weeks, and still no word. We stay busy in an office space MCC has set up for us in the headquarters in Akron, PA. A definite benefit has been spending time with our families, including our grandchildren Annie and Ivan, and Ruth’s mother who now needs a constant caregiver.

We try not to get too frustrated by this major interruption in our lives. We practice living in the present and not getting too stressed about the future. It's an adventure, right? We are also in somewhat tentative discussions with MCC administrators about the implications of this for our work and the MCC program in South Asia. Please keep us in your prayers.