One year ago today we finished! We began the day at our appointment at the Embassy. 7 of the families in our group had our visa appointments, the 2 families with the oldest children had to wait on their tb results to be submitted to the Embassy before they could get appointments. Our appointments were set for 9am, so we all traveled over to get through security in time. The place was very full. This Embassy, being in a bigger city and offering more services, was very large and very full. We waited for quite awhile, but really not too bad. The babies all did so well.
When it was our turn, we were called to the window, the technician examined eveything we had submitted, returned our documents, and asked us several questions. After finishing up each family would reorganize their documents and make sure we had been returned everything. These were precious papers and we needed to be sure we didn't leave without having them all. After our group was done we were told to return in the afternoon for visas.
We went to a travel office to change flights for many in our group. Some families choose to leave this day, praying the visas would in fact come though in time. Others choose not to change flights from their original. We decided to change our flights to the next day, which was 2 days sooner than we had originally planned. We wanted the extra time to get our packing done and be sure the visa came in, we also were happy that the money we would save on the accomodations, food, etc would almost pay the entire cost of changing our tickets.
A group of us then visited the Lion Zoo that afternoon while others were packing, and little did we know, at least one family had to run back to the Embassy to show something, stressful for them. I have no pictures to share of the Lion Zoo, it was actually quite depressing to me and I never turned on my camera. It was a good experience and made me really appreciate how well the animals are treated at the zoos I have been to elsewhere. It was nice to walk along and visit with our guide and the other families who went along.
At 3pm that afternoon our guide was able to go to the Embassy and pick up all our visas, the 7 from the appointments earlier that day. We were so thankful to hold those precious packets in our hands. They each had the picture we had taken on Mon on the front with their name and we were not allowed to open them. We had to guard these carefully and have them with us at Customs when we entered the US. How thankful we were to have our last proceeding in Africa done!
That evening we began packing for our travels home. It was so nice to only think about weight and not worry about spreading things out in case we lost a suitcase, we were going home :)
Sheri
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