Travel Update #1

Have you ever been duped, my reader? When I say duped, I don’t mean the kind of duped where someone touches your right shoulder and they’re actually on your left. I don’t mean the kind of duped when you were an infant and you saw your parent’s face. Then suddenly they disappeared behind a random set of hands with an inquisitive, “where’s the baby?” only to reappear with a condescending, “there he is,” as they proceed to scare the living daylights out of you. No, I mean a different level of duped. I’m talking about being royally duped. The type of duped where you just sit there in disbelief because you had never thought it possible of ever being duped so badly that you are struck, literally, not metaphorically, dumb. This is a kind of dupe that makes you think, and then realize, that the world is so much bigger than you, and that as much as you wish you could control your environment, it is apparently clear that your own ego will never truly be able to impose itself upon those things around you because, for lack of a better explanation, you are only human.

I’ve been duped like this a few times in my life, more particularly while traveling. I’ve had a bus sideswiped in Connecticut. I had a plane delayed several hours on my way to North Carolina. My father and I had a connecting flight canceled and decided to rent a car, driving through the most horrendous thunderstorm I have ever seen. I have had German security guards sift through all my possessions on my way back from Germany, which is not nearly as scary as a man with a mouse badge on his shoulder asking you to step aside for a random security check at Disney World. I know this because I have experienced both. Then there was that time I got stuck in the Azores in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean because of an airline work strike. And who could forget the more recent episode at the beginning of the summer when my car was struck by a deer. It really did hit me. I have the photo evidence to prove it. Nonetheless, it derailed my plans of driving to Michigan, and I then lived out of a duffle bag and backpack for the summer, which was truly a wonderful, yet unexpected, experience.

Oh yes, I have been duped. But this time the level of dupe has escalated to disproportionate scales that leaves me standing here in utter disbelief yet also thinking to myself, “Of course. Why would it be any other way?”

If you had not noticed, every time I mentioned a departure date, I always included the caveat, “granted my passport arrives by Saturday.” And as you can probably guess by the obvious and predictable build-up of this blog post, my passport, indeed, did not arrive Saturday. The natural consequence is clear: no passport, no visa, no plane ride to a foreign country. That being said, here I am, temporarily stuck state-side.

There is not much of a story to tell. The Malagasy Embassy received my application for a visa. They had no idea what to do with it because Fulbright ETAs have never gone to Madagascar before. So the US Embassy in Madagascar started the diplomatic engines of war, and our primary advisor there spoke with probably every human being alive in the Ministry of National Education and Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Madagascar, both of whom seemed to have no idea under whose jurisdiction my scholarship, which is partly funded by their government, falls. The lack of communication between these two government bodies is even more astonishing when you learn that their buildings are not even across the street from one another. In fact, there’s barely a sidewalk that separates them. The buildings are so close that one could have written on sticky notes and post them in the windows, and that probably would have been a faster means of communicating about my visa. Regardless, the Malagasy Embassy in DC finally received the last of my documents, a letter sign from the Secretary General, and shipped off my passport with my visa in it on what should have been an overnight shipping.

Now, of course, the package was not delivered overnight. And after impatiently waiting all day, I made several phone calls to the postage company, whose name will go unsaid. But if you saw a rather short person playing basketball who could touch rim, you’d say he has a lot of… ups. Anyways, the last time I called they put me through to a supervisor, mostly because I went in with guns-a-blazing and clarified that my passport was lost in their transit system with literally thousands of dollars’ worth of rescheduling issues if they could not find it. To his credit, the supervisor really did everything he could to figure out when my passport would arrive. Yet despite these efforts, my passport will not be coming until Monday, and seeing as today is Sunday, the day I was supposed to leave, my departure date will be postponed, which is nothing new at this point At this point it appears that I will have a new departure date of December 3rd and return date of August 31st. As I told some family last night, bad news is I had to cancel my flight. Good news is I’ll be home for Thanksgiving.

All in all, I suppose I’m supposed to take this as a lesson of abandonment. That is, this whole situation was out of my hands, and in spite of my endeavors, my human capacities cannot control my environment. It’s a lesson I planned on learning while in Madagascar, a place where things don’t go according to plan or run on time. And if I am totally honest, I did not take the lesson well yesterday. That puts the score between anxiety and me as 1-0 with my score on the right. And the stress was a lot yesterday to the point that it made me a little nauseous. Although, that could have totally been the bad mozzarella sticks I had for breakfast.

I will have to take it as an act of Divine Providence. For whatever reason, my time in Madagascar is not now, but soon. I have to learn to let got and trust in others and in God rather than myself, something I have very much struggled with all my life and runs contrary to our culture of extreme independence. Ah, well at least I have some time to think about it.

May God be praised.