The third US visa

To me, this summer is the "dealing-with-embassy" season. Back to May and June, I have been to Chinese Embassy in New York for at least 3-4 times. After, I sent my passport to the Embassy of Ghana in Washington to get permission to go to Africa. Before I leave for Ghana, I was rejected at the airport and was told to get a UK visa through the Consulate of UK in NY. Now I am in Ghana, I also need a visa to go back to US to continue my education in US.

To be honest, I hate dealing with the government agencies like Embassy. Unlike companies, they never put the concerns of the customers into consideration. They are slow and sometimes arrogant. A friend of mine needed a German visa to go to Europe in this summer, the German Embassy rejected her because she had no "letter of good conduct". In the history of her education abroad program, she was the first one who was asked to get that, due to a very pale reason. She had to travel between Penn State and New York, back and force, to get this done.

Among all the Embassies, US is probably the hardest one to deal with. One of reasons is that they require to interview every student visa applicants. In China, tens of thousands of people want to come to US for study. In front of the visa officers, they needed to defend themselves like a plaintiff, to prove they have no attempt to migrate to US. Years ago, two-thirds of the student visa applicants may be rejected due to the reason of being labeled as "potential immigrants". Thus, by the time I was admitted by Penn State, my important daily life is to practice how to deal with a visa officer and not make him suspect me. Now that I have been issued US visa twice, I am quite good at that. Before leaving for Ghana, I have obtained every single document that I can think of to persuade a visa officer.

The Embassy of US in Ghana allows the first 100 applicants for the visa interview to enter at 7:30am every Wednesday. I arrived at 6:30 am. I realized I was the only non-Ghanaian applicant. We were called in around 7:45, and the visa officers started working on time at 8am. I felt I waited for a long time on my chair because I fell asleep and had several dreams.

Once I was called, I walked into the window with full confidence. I opened my document file and took out a pile of documents, and waited for my "trial". The officer was a amicable guy around 30 . To my surprise, his questions were "How was Penn State?Do you like Ghana?"But I still anticipated him to ask for the documents. I picked up my documents and showed him without being asked, "This is the letter written by the ISS officers","That is my transcript", "Oh, I also have my bank certificate. Do you want to have a look?" He looked at me and smiled, "Ok, ok, calm down. I trust you. You are fine." And without researched on my paperworks, he just asked some simple questions and told me to pick up my visa on Friday.

I have realized that the general characteristics of the visa officers may be different in different countries. Maybe the busy and chaotic metropolitan environment has affected the officers in New York or Shanghai? But at least here in a relatively poor place, I felt some kindness through dealing with the government workers in Accra.