Sunday, June 23, 2013

My Visa

So as part of your mission papers you have to fill out visa forms.  My Visa I was informed, was one of the hardest to get out of all the countries in the world.  The list of forms that I had to present was 12-15 items long.  So I got it about April10, and we started to work on it. Most of it was pretty easy, fill out this form, notarize this, sign here.  Not that hard. So I was about 2/3 of the way done and the first challenge that popped up was a background check. I went to Fishers police to request a background check for international travel purposes and they immediately shut me down.  We don't do anything international they said, you have to go down to the State Police for that.  So I called the State Police, emailed them to try to figure out how to get one.  They gave the number of this company to call who was trying to charge me for the service. As we were trying to figure this all out, I emailed Bishop Hanson of the Zionsville Branch to see how they completed it b/c his son is going to Brazil as well. They apparently went down to the sheriffs office to get it done and they did it right there. So we took a trip up to the sheriffs office, said nothing about international travel, and we got it done.  All of my notarized documents then had to be sent to the Secretary of State for Indiana for notary authentication.  We sent all of my notarized documents, which was quite a lot, and got most of them back 4 days later authenticated.  My drivers permit and Passport were not being authenticated and it would take us 3 tries to get them finally authenticated over a period of a month. That was a struggle. When we went to gather up all the papers to send to Salt Lake, we couldn't find my birth certificate.  My Opa was planning to come from my graduation that weekend so he got them in Arizona and sent them certified mail to us to try to get it there as fast as possible. Well the post office left it on the counter for a few days, and then when it did arrive, nobody was at the house b/c we were all at graduation that Saturday, we had to go pick it up on Monday.  When we went to pick up we brought all of the other papers, picked up my birth certificates, stuck one in the envelope and mailed my visa papers to Salt Lake on June 10th! It took 2 months, but they were finally done!