Friday, March 21, 2008

Hitched and Harnessed… Have Siamese Twin, Will Travel

I’ve done my own taxes all my life, Schedule C and SE, 1099’s and 1040 long forms, estimated tax and exempt foreign income ad infintum ad nauseam. So big deal, but I also did my own Customs brokering back in the halcyon days when business was my disease, Forms 3461 and 7501, formal entries and intensive exams, textile quotas and certificates of origin. I’ve done Customs entries in different cities on the same day, leaving Flagstaff at 3am to drive to Nogales, Mexico, picking up goods at the train station there and crossing back over the border, doing the paperwork and awaiting my release, then driving to Phoenix and getting my papers submitted there in time to clear my goods before the day’s over, then driving back to Flagstaff as the sun sets over the purple sage, all in a day’s work. It’s hard to appreciate if you haven’t been there, not to mention the anxiety of ‘crossing the border’ every couple of weeks and having to clear Customs. The point is that none of this compares to getting a visa for your foreign fiancée, all by yourself and starting from scratch. ‘Scratch’ in this case is the forms you submit to CIS (formerly INS) in the US. This includes bank statements and verifications, pictures of you and the lady taken within the last thirty days, and evidence of your relationship, all in addition to the multiple application forms and biographical information. We had a picture taken of ourselves reading the Bangkok Post with a big picture of the Korean-American mass murderer on the front just to date us and place us and send a little signal about the absurdity of their requirements. I feel sure they smiled.

If you’re lucky they’ll send you an acknowledgement of receipt. If you’re unlucky they’ll tell you some info is lacking and they’ll need more forms. All this is rather sketchy and dependent on the uncertainties of the US postal system, but fortunately you can track it somewhat on their website, assuming you know your code. When your forms are all in order within a few months they’ll kick it over to the National Visa Center where, once again if your forms are in order, they’ll kick it to the country where the visa will be issued, in this case Thailand, who will process the applications and initiate the continuing process over there. Once again this step is rather sketchy though somewhat traceable, but hopefully the mail won’t get lost. The first time we did all this five years ago, all the US paperwork went like clockwork but we never got the paperwork on the Thailand side. Presumably the mail got lost over there. For better or worse our circumstances had changed a bit over the year-long process, so after a couple of tentative phone calls with limited results, I decided to forfeit rather than pursue it at that time. This time started off even worse. I never received any acknowledge of receipt at any point. I traced it to the point that it went to the National Visa Center, but then could find no record of it. As I was waiting for their two-month deadline to expire to officially conclude the papers lost, suddenly it shows up, not there, but at my fiancée’s doorstep in Thailand, the whole package of forms from the US embassy in Bangkok shuttled down a humble middle-class alley by the Royal Thai Mail. I couldn’t believe it; still can’t.

At least at that point it’s my wife’s turn to do some work. There are medical exams to be done, by pre-approved doctors only, half a dozen in Bangkok, one or two in Chiang Mai. Fortunately Chiang Mai’s only a few hours from Chiang Rai. Unfortunately my lady’s had TB, probably had it in fact when we met, though the diagnosis came about a year later. TB is a slow burn, almost winning by robbing you of the will to fight it. I’ve often accused my wife of putting herself on the market because she thought she was going to die and wanted to suck(er) someone into taking care of her family. She denies it, but I don’t know… She thinks about death almost more than I do. Anyway after three Thai doctors fumbled the diagnosis and she had had enough Aids tests to supply Africa for a year and her father had started making little black magic shrines in auspicious corners of the property, I finally said something cursory, spent an hour on the Internet, and told her I thought she had TB. The (fourth) official diagnosis came in within a day later. Then followed six months of four different antibiotics, enough presumably so that no bacteria could outsmart them all. So it’s a big deal. The new doctor, while approving her current health, made her carry fresh X-rays around with her, just begging a challenge. In fact TB is making a big comeback on the world stage, simply because people don’t eradicate the disease completely, so it comes back. She needed a police clearance also, for which she had to make a special trip to Bangkok. You have to apply for the actual visa online, in English, and then pay for the bloody thing at the Thai post office. After researching further I Skyped her from the US and told her to pay the fee before year-end 2007, when the price was to go up. When you get the forms in order, you send a checklist telling them the forms are in order and await a date for the interview.

They finally set her date at March 10, which was good, since I could be there, too. There was only one problem. Her passport expires November 9, and you need at least eight months validity. So I Skyped her from Senegal and told her to get a new passport before the interview. For those of you who don’t know already, one of the latest nicest and most inexpensive developments for the traveler is the rise of Skype’s Internet-based telephone service. Unlike previous services like Net2Phone, etc. the lag-time between transmission and reception is down so low that unless someone is a really fast talker and the signal is good, it’s usually not much of a problem. You certainly don’t have to say “over” walkie-talkie-like after each side is finished speaking so the other party won’t overlap. Just speak at a normal unhurried rate. As they tell you repeatedly, this service is not designed for emergencies anyway. But Thailand doesn’t do passports locally anymore, so she had to make another trip to Chiang Mai. This runaround is wearing me out just thinking about it. If companies do all this work for you they charge $1000- $2000 depending on the level of service. I’d probably recommend it unless you’re a pro bono lawyer by profession.

So when the day finally came the tension was running high. Her appointment note told her to submit papers at 7:30 am, which I thought was pretty absurd, but not half as absurd as the line that was already there a full half hour before that. It looked like a security line at LAX airport. I guess they were mostly tourists, first come first serve, because we got to bypass them with our fancy little card with an actual date on it. In our category was a motley crew, including one little twenty-ish Bimbette with a sixty-ish Farang in tow and one older woman with her entire family there. They were shuffling papers and swearing oaths and moving on to other windows and suffering other ignominies that only stiffened my resolve to push this thing through, if for no other reason than to avoid ever having to go through it again. When my wife finally got her turn, they told me to please have a seat, then put her through the paces with the help of an interpreter. In fact, they dismissed her so quickly that I was sure she’d failed. But no, she was told to come pick up the passport with visa in two days. When she did, they strongly advised her to enter the US as soon as possible since her medical exam was due to expire in two months. That was the glitch we needed, since I had wanted to look for an immediate flight but her mother had forbade it due to her father’s health. Well we rushed home and Pa looked okay to us so we booked a flight the next day to leave in three. I usually eat what’s put before me, even on airplanes, but the boiled rice didn’t inspire me, and as the plane began its final descent into LAX the wife suddenly felt ill and started puking, something I’ve never seen her do before. This continued all the while the plane taxied to the terminal, an awkward start to a new country, to say the least. I think it was just nervous jitters, because from there things went smoothly, immigration, customs, rental car, etc., at least until we got to Kingman, where I-40 was closed because of a 139-car pile-up by Flagstaff, our destination. Two days later we got married, officially, only six days after receiving her visa, all in a day’s, I mean a week’s, I mean a year’s work.

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