Day 241 - Getting Out Of Town

Leaving Barbados and getting to Moldova was my most complicated transfer.

Image of U.S. passport by origami_potato,
via Flickr.com

First, I had to get the immigrant visa petitions for Alex and our son filed so they could arrive in the U.S. as legal immigrants. This wouldn't have been strictly necessary since Alex and I expected to leave the U.S. less than two months later and our son could have attended school on a student visa, but we wanted Alex to be naturalized so that we both would travel to Moldova on American diplomatic passports. That would also make it easier for Alex to get a visa to travel to Moldova and to get work there.

Normally an immigrant must live in the United States for five years before being eligible to apply for citizenship. But there are expedited procedures for family members of U.S. government employees who are ordered to leave the U.S. within that five-year window.

There are many documentary requirements for an immigrant visa petition, including getting a police clearance from any areas the recipient of the petition, i.e., Alex, had lived for at least six months after the age of 18. In Alex's case, that meant something not very common since for the previous year he had lived four days a week in St. Lucia and three days a week in Barbados. He had to get police clearances from both countries for the same period of time.

I had my own challenges getting orders because the majority of the people being sent to the newly independent states were already in Washington so the technicians writing up their orders could follow standard procedures. Those in Washington going to Moldova didn't need orders including five days of consultation; they were already in Washington where they could consult with all the offices in Washington with an interest in Moldova. In my case, however, that extension the year before required that I take home leave, a once-every-two-year benefit, the summer before. Consultation days are only included on orders that include home leave. The standard procedures in my case meant my orders coming just one year after I had taken my home leave would be for a direct transfer, like a Monopoly Go directly to jail, do not pass GO card. But it wasn't possible to travel directly to Moldova from Barbados. Since Moldova had only existed a few months, there was no diplomatic presence in Barbados for me to get a visa. There also was no information on how to get to Moldova from ANYWHERE at that point. I kept explaining to my technician that my orders must include a stop in Washington. I needed consultation days. I needed a visa. I needed travel arrangements.

Then I made a serious mistake: I mentioned my husband's naturalization as a reason to be in Washington.  We already had an appointment for September 3 and the next opportunity wouldn't be until October, long after we were expected to be in Moldova. I should have learned from all my interviews with Iranian visa applicants that mentioning too many reasons just meant I would say something the technicians would be able to use to disregard my request because they were personal reasons and for my convenience, not official and for the government's benefit. It took intervention from someone from the executive office for the regional bureau responsible for Barbados to make it clear that the naturalization was incidental, not the reason for the travel to Washington, because once I had mentioned something personal, the technician wouldn't listen to anything else from me.

Image of new citizen by Aviad T,
via Flickr.com

Eventually the orders came, we planned our travel to get us to Moorhead to get our son into high school for his final year before college. We traveled to Washington for my days of consultation, for Alex's naturalization, for Alex to get his tourist and diplomatic passports, for us to get travel arranged to get to Moldova, for us to apply for our Russian visa because Moldova didn't yet have the infrastructure to issue their own visas, and then to wait. We waited, and waited. My five days of consultation came to an end and there was no estimate for when the visas would be ready. Saturday was the only day Air Moldova flew into Moldova, from Frankfurt, so we knew that nothing would make it possible for us to travel for at least seven more days. I didn't relish the thought of getting my assignment technician to extend the number of consultation days, but without an extension, we would have to pay for the hotel room while we waited. So we flew to England to spend time with Alex's family while we waited.

At the end of the first week in England, our passports with visas had not yet arrived, so we had another week to wait. I called the embassy in Moldova to let them know we would be delayed because we didn't have the visas yet. That is when we learned that Moldova didn't require us to have any visa, let alone a Russian visa. But we also didn't have our diplomatic passports, so we couldn't continue our travels until the next week anyway.

By the following Saturday, we had our passports, we traveled to Frankfurt, and we finally made our way to Moldova.

Day 227 - The McDonald's Model

About six months into my tour in the consular section, our offices were moved from the third floor of a downtown building to a standalone building about a mile further away from the embassy. The main reason was security. Consular sections need to provide easy access for the visa and passport applicants who visit them, but they also need to provide security for the staff. In a mixed use building the former is possible, but the latter is complicated. At that time, there wasn't pressure to collocate (that's the way the Department spells it; I prefer co-locate) all U.S. government operations in the same building. That preference came later.

The layout of our new consular facilities was touted by management in Washington as the model for all future consular sections at other locations. Someone in the upper levels at State was supposed to have said, "If McDonalds can use the same building layout everywhere in the world to provide their services, we can do so, too." Once we moved into the new offices, I concluded that it was the wrong model, but no one ever asked me my opinion.

This statement reflected the Department's desire to shift away from having all embassies designed by expensive, internationally known architects in order that they fit within the local settings because those buildings were so expensive to build. Following the same layout inside was an initial step in the direction of standardizing, expected to save money when purchasing furniture and equipment.

image of an open plan office by jasra, via Flickr.com

Most of us had never seen the new location before the Friday when we packed the contents of our desks into boxes and watched them removed from the building, put into trucks, and then driven down the street. It took us all of the Friday normal business hours to pack up our offices, the storeroom, and the common area but we were expected to be open the following Monday so we had to spend most of Friday evening and much of the weekend getting unpacked and set up in our new quarters. Even putting in those extra hours wasn't enough, but we had to open so we limped along the rest of the next week, juggling visa interviews with office setup.

Our old offices had been one large square space divided into quarters with one quarter serving as the waiting area, the two quarters adjoining it were large rooms with multiple desks without partitions between them and the fourth quarter had private offices for only four of the Americans - the Consul General, the Deputy Consul, and two of the Vice Consuls. My office was a desk in one of the common rooms. The advantage was my proximity to the windows where I could enjoy the sound of the rain.

image of cubicles by Michael Lokner, via Flickr.com

Our new offices were entirely an open floorplan with cubicles for everyone except the Consul General and the Deputy Consul. I looked forward to having cubicle walls around my desk so that I would have more privacy. Our desks, however, were more like tables. There were no drawers to put the things we had packed up. And the desk surface area was smaller than what we had in the old location, making the option of stacking things on them inadequate. There was also a problem with the outlets in our cubicles. The phone jack was on one of the cubicle panels but the electrical outlet was on the opposite panel. That made positioning the desk to allow for both a telephone and a computer challenging. We ended up using extension cords draped over the cubicle walls so that the desks could be against one side without running a cord across the floor that might trip someone.

But the cubicles proved to be a big cultural challenge for us. We Americans saw cubicle walls as providing privacy to anyone within them. When we walked by the cubicles of our local staff, we respected their privacy and walked by without disturbing them. The Bajan employees on the other hand saw that behavior as very rude. They expected each person to greet every other person every morning. We had followed that rule in the old space when we said "Good morning" while we walked through them to our office space, but we Americans stopped following that rule in the new space because we really didn't know about this cultural norm. In the new building, our respect for the staff's privacy was seen as our being impolite and the local staff set out to prove this to us by their walking around the building first thing each morning and popping their heads into each of our cubicles to say "Good morning," even if we were on the phone or speaking in person with someone else in our cubicles. "How rude," we all thought.

All of this happened before the fight between the Bajan secretary and the wife of the American General Services Officer.

Even without the benefit of our later cultural sensitivity training after the fight, I saw one aspect of the new layout as very disrepectful to the local staff, although I didn't discuss it with any of them. At this point, not many of the local staff seemed willing to talk to me about anything and I wasn't eager to rock the boat.

Here is what I thought showed disrepect to our staff:

The new consular section was one very large rectangular room, divided into two parts by a wall of interview windows the full length of the space. The smaller portion, roughly one-third of the space, was the waiting room which had its own entrance with a walk-through-metal-detector and package Xray machine, to improve the security of the space. We employees entered through a separate entrance that did not have those extra security measures. There were chairs in the waiting room, but once we called an applicant for the interview, they stood on their side of the windows. No chairs were provided for the applicants at the windows because it is more difficult to encourage someone who is seated to leave when they are told we would not issue them a visa than it is to encourage someone who is already standing.

That meant that we consular officers either had to stand all day on our side of the window or our side needed a raised floor so that we could sit. The latter design option was selected, but instead of raising the floor of the entire work area, only enough of a platform to allow a row of chairs was created. Then, because it was a safety risk for us to be seated in desk chairs with wheels on the platform, they added a banister at the back of the platform so that we wouldn't roll off and get hurt. That was a good thing, but there were only two places along the row of 13 interview windows where there was a break in the banister to allow us to step up and squeeze our way through to our windows along the very narrow space behind the chairs. Once we each took our seats, we pretty much stayed there until all the applicants in the room had been interviewed, four to five hours later.

Here comes the culturally insensitive part. In those cases where we decided to issue the visa, we had to get the passport and application to the local staff behind us. The options were:

• Get up out of our chairs and make our way to the steps at the closest break in the banister and go to the table where the local staff worked, then making our way back to our window;
• Put the passport and application on the floor behind us which would require that the local staff bend over to pick them up;
• Place the application and passport on the banister, hoping they will balance there until one of the local staff collected them; 
• Keep all the passports and applications at our desks until the local staff asked for them or until we finished our interviews when we would then hand over the work to the local employees who now would have less time to complete their part; or
• Raise a hand and snap fingers or shout to get the attention of one of the local staff in order that someone would collect.

The first option disrupted the other consular officers and interrupted the flow of work. The other four options seemed very disrespectful of the local employees, especially since all of the American visa interviewing officers were white and none of the local staff were.

Image of McDonalds in Japan by Akoaraisin, via Flickr.com

I've never worked at McDonald's, so I don't know if there are aspects of their employees' workspaces that show so little respect to one group of them as I saw in our model consular section space. I felt strongly enough about the cultural factors that should have been taken into account in the new consular layout that I drafted a telegram to share those thoughts. The Department uses draft instead of write because not everything that is drafted gets sent. My draft telegram remained a draft, never sent. The pessimist in me (I let that side show every now and then) thinks it doesn't matter because it would likely never have been read either.

Day 226 - Whenwes in Barbados

In Doha, Alex introduced me to the concept of the whenwes, people who couldn't stop talking about when we were in Algeria or Singapore or Abidjan. They gave the impression that the grass over there was just perfect. The comparison meant, of course, that where we were now wasn't good enough, the way things were done here wasn't good enough, bringing on deep feelings of inferiority in others.

In Barbados, I may have come across as a whenwe to the staff in the consular section. I couldn't help myself from comparing how the local staff prepared visa application packages for us to review with how it was done in Germany. There were some big differences.

Image of mail by Warm 'n Fuzzy, via Flickr.com

Here's how the local staff in Germany prepared applications for us:

• They opened up the mailed-in applications and stacked all the documentation behind the application itself and stapled the package together at the top.
• They also stapled the photo to the corner of the application.
• They compared the information on the applicant's passport with the first six lines of the application form. 
• If there were any discrepancies, they circled the item on the application form. 
• They also checked to see if there was a previously issued visa in the passport and added a note on the application so we rarely ever had to open the passport to look at it.
• They stacked about 20 applications in a box and stacked the boxes in the order the applications were opened, with the most recently opened boxes on the bottom. 
• To make sure we knew which boxes should be done next, they also added a paper with the date stamped on it to the top of each box. 
• Before we consular officers even looked at the boxes, the staff ran the names through our name check system and provided the information from the name check with the application and the printout for the box to be sure we saw all the results. 
• If the applicant had applied before and been refused, they pulled the previous applications from the files and attached them as well. 

By the time we consular officers got the boxes, most questions that might occur to us had already been asked and answered. Our decision was an either or one - either we decided to issue the visa or we invited the applicant to come for an interview.

Image of questions on a U.S. visa application
by Magalie L'Abbé, via Flickr.com

I thought that is the way it was done in all consular sections. I suspect that all first-tour consular officers end their tours thinking what they experienced is the way it is done in all consular sections. But most consular officers on the visa line only do that work in one consular assignment. I was an exception. I had experience, but that didn't mean I was an experienced consular officer. I was a whenwe.

Here is how the local staff prepared the visa applications for us in Barbados.

• They opened the outer envelope.
• They removed everything from the envelope and stuck it into the middle of the passport.
• They wrapped a rubber band around the passport as many times as they could.
• They stacked them in boxes and put them on our desks.

That meant that we consular officers had to take the rubber band off, often getting snapped in the face when it broke. We had to open all the separate envelopes that the applicants included - one for their bank letter, one for their employment letter, one from their pastor or political representative, one for the invitation, and one for their itinerary. That is one reason we could so easily see when the documents were typed on the same typewriter. We had to find the photo and staple it to the application. And we had to look at the back page of the passport to see if an application had been received before and then go to the files ourselves to find the previous application.

Locating previous applications was another big difference. In Germany, we kept only applications of those who had been refused, sorted alphabetically by last name, in our file drawers in the office. Approved applications were alphabetized by last name and bundled by date and stored in a store room in the basement. In Barbados, all applications were kept in the file drawers by date, but the applications were not alphabetized. They were folded into thirds with just a sliver of the top of the form folded over and stapled. That bit of folded-over paper often hid the form behind it. We had to remove the entire day's packet of applications and spread them out on a desk to find the application by looking through them one at a time. Often, the application we looked for wasn't there because the applicant came back another day so the previous application may have been removed from that day's pile and refiled on another date. I asked Anthony* why the applications weren't alphabetized before they were filed away. His response: Why did we Americans always think things should run more efficiently at the consulate than at Bajan government offices? Our applicants didn't expect better service from us, so why should we give them better service?

When all of that was done, we had the same decision options - issue the visa or invite the applicant for an interview. But, when making the decision to issue, the work still wasn't done because the name checks weren't done until after the decision to issue. There was a logical explanation for why the name checks were done in a different order in the two countries. In contrast to Germany where the majority of the applications were approved, in Barbados, the majority of the applications were refused. The name checks were not necessary for the applications we refused. To reduce unnecessary work (hooray!), name checks were only run once we made the decision to issue.  If the name check turned up information, that meant a second interview.

But it still seemed like so much work that changing the process could eliminate. Having already heard the local staff complain about how all the Americans made changes just because we did things differently elsewhere, I kept my thoughts to myself until one day when I was the only visa interviewing officer in the office. The waiting room was full. I had to interview everyone, and I still would have to deal with the mailed-in applications. I decided to ask Cartright*, the senior local employee, to try following a different process. I don't think I mentioned that what I was about to ask was based on my experience in Germany, but I am sure Cartright wasn't fooled. I asked him to have the staff open up all the envelopes, remove the contents and stack and staple the documents together and then put them inside the passports without rubber bands. He didn't look happy, but he said he would follow my instructions.

Here is how he and the others followed my instructions:

• They opened all the envelopes.
• They took the papers out of the envelopes and stacked them together, some of them upside down, some of them reverse side up, some of them the reverse side up AND upside down, some of them folded in half.
• They folded the resulting stack of papers in half and stapled the stack of papers in the middle, with several staples.
• They put the papers inside the passports and wrapped them with a rubber band before putting them into the boxes.

Can you spell passive resistance? Or maybe that should be PASSIVE RESISTANCE.

I let it go for a few days. Eventually I mentioned to Cartright that I would like the documents all facing the same way and with the tops of each at the top of the stack, with just one staple. At that point, Cartright had reached the end of his patience. He threw the passport and application documents he had in his hand onto his desk and shouted at me that he was only doing what I had told him to do and here I was telling him to do something else instead.

Change doesn't come easily in the Caribbean.

*a name, not necessarily the right one

Day 190 - What Does Citizenship Have To Do With Grades?

Image of German flag by fdecomite, via Flickr.com

One of the most interesting American Citizens Services cases I handled was when a father brought his 15-year-old son to the consulate for him to renounced his American citizenship. The father had renounced his citizenship many years before. The mother was German. And the boy was born before 1975 when the only claim to German citizenship was through the father and not the mother. Exceptions included cases where the parents were unmarried (in which case German mothers could pass on citizenship) or where the German mother applied for the child to be registered as German on or before 31 December 1977. His mother had not applied for him by the deadline which meant the boy was American and only American.

The boy couldn't renounce his citizenship because he was not yet 18. If he had filled out the application to renounce his citizenship and sworn, or affirmed, that he chose willingly to give up his American citizenship, he could have later claimed the renunciation was invalid since he was still a minor at the time. Maybe that's what I should have done - allowed the boy to renounce his citizenship because his father insisted and then explained to the boy that he could take back his renunciation later. But I was still learning how to be a bureaucrat in those days. I had spent a lot of time learning all about the rules and I felt I was responsible for following them.

So first I talked with the father. I explained that his son wasn't old enough to renounce his citizenship. The father responded that his son wasn't doing well in school because he couldn't speak German. The father believed that because his son was an American and not a German, he would continue having problems learning German as well as other subjects.  He thought his son's renouncing his American citizenship was important. The father said he himself had experienced similar problems before he renounced his American citizenship. At work, he didn't do well because he didn't speak German. Once he renounced his American citizenship and became a German citizen, his life at work improved.

I could understand that his father's life probably improved once he became a German citizen. But I wasn't able to make the connection to his claim that his son wasn't doing well in school because he didn't speak German well and that was because he was still an American citizen.

Maybe there were some undercurrents of prejudice at work in the boy's school. Looking back to my elementary school days, I recall years when our classrooms had more than the normal number of students at the beginning of the year and then again at the end of the year because of the children of the migrant workers from Texas who spent May through September in the Red River Valley working in the sugar beet fields. Because those students were in our schools for such short times, it would be easy to understand the teachers not spending much time on them. After all, they would be gone soon. In fact, I can only remember one of my elementary grade teachers making any effort to integrate the migrant children into our activities. Maybe I wasn't paying attention the other years. But I don't think so.

Maybe the teachers in the boy's school thought he was just like the other American children, dependents of American service members, who might be there for a full year, but eventually would be gone. Maybe I should have paid more attention to the father's pleas on behalf of his child.

But I was a bureaucracy neophyte. So I explained to the father that it wasn't fair for him to decide on behalf of his son, that only his son could decide whether to renounce his citizenship, and that his son was too young to do so now. When his son turned 18, he could come on his own to renounce his citizenship. Or, at 18, his son could decide to travel to the U.S. to study, work, and live, something he might not be able to do if he didn't still have his American citizenship.

His father then insisted that the German authorities had advised him that it would be better if everyone in the family had the same citizenship. The boy's younger siblings, born after January 1, 1975, were dual nationals, holding German citizenship through their mother and American citizenship through their father at the time of their birth. The boy was the only one stuck in the middle, with only American citizenship.

I then talked with the boy without his father present. He had difficulty speaking either English or German, so I then had a better notion of the challenges he faced in school. And it felt all the more like his father didn't have a realistic grasp on the situation, somehow hoping that solving the citizenship dilemma would carry over to solve the boy's educational challenges.

In the end, father and son left the consulate that day, probably not convinced that I had helped them in any way.

Day 184 - The Man From TTPI

Image of TTPI license plate bywoody1778a,
via Flickr.com

My most memorable passport applicant was Miguel,* a service member who was referred to us from the consulate in Frankfurt. Of the nine consulates in Germany, only Frankfurt processed immigrant visas. Miguel joined the Army when a recruiter from Guam visited his home on one of the islands in the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI). The TTPI was a UN protectorate that had been administered since 1947 by the United States. Miguel didn't need a passport or a green card when he entered the U.S. because military members travel on their orders and his orders then were for him to complete basic training and then be assigned to Germany where he had been for the past three years.

During that time, he married a German woman with two children. He had gone to the consulate in Frankfurt to apply for immigrant visas for his wife and children because he was being reassigned to the U.S. He knew that his wife and children needed passports and immigrant visas. He didn't realize he couldn't sponsor them because he himself was neither a citizen nor a permanent resident. That is why Frankfurt sent him to Stuttgart for his family to apply for non-immigrant visas. When they appeared in the visa section, their applications were denied because they expected to remain in the U.S. with Miguel.

Miguel was understandably upset because of the runaround he was getting. Fortunately, his timing was perfect. We had just received a telegram from Washington about the end of the U.S. administration of the Trust Territories of the Pacific Islands, making way for the islands that made up the TTPI to determine whether they wanted independence or to form a different type of association with the U.S. Until the islands made their decision, the residents of the islands had the option to apply for U.S. citizenship, provided they didn't have claim on the citizenship of another country. Determining that latter condition was something that could only be done by headquarters in Washington. My job was to gather the information from Miguel that Washington needed to do the research. I also had to advise that he probably wouldn't be able to bring his family with him right away and suggested he find a place they could stay.

Questions that I thought would be easy for him to answer turned out not to be so easy. But that didn't mean that I disbelieved him. I never felt he was trying to hide anything from me. The questions were just hard for him to answer.

Miguel explained that he joined the Army in order to get away from his home because he saw everyone around him showing no initiative, with many men choosing to drink all night and sleep all day. He knew he didn't want that type of life, so he left it all behind. As a result, he wasn't sure of what his birth date was, or at least he couldn't provide me with evidence in the form of a birth certificate or a baptismal certificate because he wasn't sure that his parents had them or would get around to getting a new copy. I told him he should call his family to ask. He said he had already tried and had been waiting for months. He didn't expect to get an answer. He gave me the information he could and I sent my report to Washington. I told him to call in a week. He told me he was being transferred to the States in a week. I told him to come back the day before he had to leave to find out if I had an answer by then.

The day he came back was the day after I received a response. The sticking point had been that one of his grandparents was Korean. Miguel's answers had to go to the Embassy in Seoul for them to do the research. I don't remember the details, but I remember the result: Miguel had no claim to Korean citizenship so if he wanted to claim American citizenship, he qualified. I sent Miguel out to get passport photos so I could put together his American passport. With that in his hand, he could apply for immigrant visas for his wife and children.

I will never forget the look on Miguel's face when I handed him his passport. He opened the passport, looked at his photo, and a smile crossed his face from ear to ear as he looked up at me and said "Thanks."

Then I smiled. For the rest of the day.

*a name, not necessarily the right one

Day 182 - A Tisket, A Tasket, Oops, I Lost It

Image of sign on a bus by Lodigs, via Flickr.com

The majority of non-routine passport cases involved reports of lost passports and requests for replacements. Some were true reports. Some were not. Of the latter, some were trivial. Some were not.

I relied on my gut reaction to the initial report of the loss to decide which cases to question further. Like so many of my German visa applicants, many Americans also were not good liars. The first clue was when answers to questions were vague or included too many "I don't remember" responses. When the person on the other side of the counter could give a credible and more or less complete description of the last time he was aware he still had the passport and a logical explanation for when it was lost, I didn't ask a lot of additional questions. If the person reporting the lost passport had already reported the loss to the police, I had even fewer questions. But when the answers were overwhelmingly "I don't remember," and no report of the loss was filed with the police, I kept asking questions, pointing out that my questions were to jog her memory to help find it.

One rash of reports of lost passports arrived from high school students in the early spring. It was like a minor epidemic at a school. Everyone seemed to have lost their passports and needed replacements. The first case probably seemed normal with the likely outcome that we issued a replacement passport. But by the third report, things started sounding fishy. As I asked additional questions, more and more "I don't remember" answers came up. It was clear the persons requesting replacement passports were trying to hide something. In one case, after I asked my questions and sent the young woman away with instructions that she should look a little harder before coming back to request a replacement, she left, but only for a short time. She returned to explain why she had asked for a new passport.

Her class, she explained, was taking a trip to East Germany and they were planning to travel by bus. But she was the daughter of a U.S. service member which meant she had a status of forces agreement, or SOFA, stamp in her passport. The status of forces agreement outlined the rights and responsibilities of U.S. service members and their family members while in Germany. One of the responsibilities was to limit travel between West Germany and West Berlin to three routes - one by air, one by train, and one by one highway. The young woman's class trip would not follow one of those routes. So she thought she would get a second passport without a SOFA stamp. Someone had told her all she needed to do was say she had lost hers and she could get a new one.

I was probably more bureaucratic than sympathetic in my response. I pointed out that those covered by the status of forces agreement had responsibilities as well as rights. The bottom line - I wouldn't issue a second passport to her.

Other reports of lost passports appeared to be less benign. Another group of lost passports was reported by former U.S. service members who were living in the Mannheim area. We suspected that passports were being sold. And there were still active underground terrorist groups in Europe, so the thought of U.S. passports in the hands of the Red Army Faction was unpleasant at best.

One man who reported his passport lost was most memorable for the contrast between all of his "I can't remembers" and the full details he could recall when I asked clarifying questions. For example, he couldn't remember where he last used his passport although it was within the past month. He traveled a lot for his job as a logistics specialist. Maybe it was when he traveled to France, or maybe it as to Switzerland.  I pointed out that the French government had only recently introduced the requirement that American citizens had to have visas to travel to France. My conversation with him went something like this:

"Have you ever applied for a French visa," I asked.

"No," he responded.

"Then I think it is unlikely that you last used your passport on a trip to France. Maybe it was when you traveled to Switzerland." I suggested.

"I didn't need to get a visa for France," he countered with just a bit of a challenge in his voice, "because I traveled by train. They issue visas to passengers on the train at the border."

It was amazing how well he remembered some details, but not others.

The interview window in the American Citizen Services section was within line of sight for the Marine on duty in the consular waiting room. While I was interviewing this man with two contrasting memories, the phone on the desk near me rang. The applicant had raised his voice so loudly that the Marine wanted to know if I needed help. I declined the offer and explained to the applicant, again, that in cases such as his, I advise looking harder for his lost passport before returning to apply for a replacement again.

He didn't return. But he did write a letter to the Consul complaining about my refusal to issue a replacement passport in which he exhibited his superior powers of observation as he described me, the color of my dress, and my matching shoes - shoes that he couldn't see while at the interview window. When my boss read the letter, she agreed that his letter just further undermined his credibility as the contrast between the details he chose to recall and those he couldn't was so dramatic.

Day 181 - The Weiss Brothers

After a year working in the Visa Section, I moved to the American Citizen Services Section where the majority of the work involved issuing passports and reports of birth abroad to family members of service members in Germany. Once again, like visa applications, most of these cases were straight forward. But a few were interesting.

The Weiss brothers were definitely interesting.

Image of cowboys by DangerRanger,
via Flickr.com

The two brothers showed up wearing cowboy hats, cowboy boots, and big smiles, requesting that we arrange to repatriate them back to the U.S. because they had run out of money. But the kicker was that they had previously been repatriated back to the U.S. from Stuttgart and their explanation for why we should do it again was that they hadn't yet repaid the repatriation loan from that first occassion three or five years before. They had copies of the paperwork to prove it.

The brothers were Amcits, State-speak for American citizens, but they spoke English with an accent that suggested an eastern European background. Russian was my guess.

The reason their case was interesting is that the brothers shouldn't have been issued new passports until after they had repaid the previous loan. When U.S. citizens are repatriated, their passports are annotated to expire when they arrive back in the U.S. and a hold is placed on any new applications until the loan to cover the cost of repatriation has been repaid. Repatriation is intended to be a last resort for Americans in trouble overseas. Even people who are evacuated out of dangerous places such as Tehran in February of 1979 end up with a bill for a representative cost of their last-minute flight out if town. Let that be a lesson to you if you were thinking of taking an adventure vacation in one of the world's hot spots, assuming the USG, that is how we refer to the United States Government in State-speak, will bail you out.

So the Weiss brothers showing up, claiming they were broke and needed to be repatriated again in spite of the fact that they still owed the government for the earlier trip home, was interesting. The first question to answer was how they got those passports. And that required sending a message back to Washington to verify that the passports were legitimate.

They were. All we got as an explanation was that someone made a mistake when the new passports were issued. So we decided we needed to dig deeper. Since the original case was several years old, that meant digging into our files in the basement. We explained to the brothers that they would have to come back in a few days.

They were impatient, so they came back earlier than we were ready to give them an answer. And this time, they brought their parents. They were not U.S. citizens, so they had no passports. They also didn't have the same last name. Theirs was definitely Slavic, perhaps Russian. They were permanent residents, green card holders, who had reentry permits. These are travel documents issued to permanent residents who have a legitimate reason to be out of the U.S. for an extended period of time. The boys informed us that they wanted their parents to be repatriated as well. Now that posed a few problems because repatriation isn't extended to non-citizens, even those with green cards. But we collected their reentry permits and photocopied all the pages, at the strong recommendation of my boss. It turned out to be a very good step since there were pages missing from both of those documents. That led us to look more closely at the brothers' passports. They were also missing a few pages. The boys claimed they had been in Germany only a few weeks, but missing pages suggested there may be something bigger they wanted to hide.

After interviewing the brothers again, asking a long series of questions regarding where they had been since they left the U.S., I sent a second report to Washington with their explanation for their predicament, along with a summary of their previous repatriation file and their request that we repatriate their parents as well. I also copied the other consulates in Germany in order to find out if the brothers had previously appeared anywhere else to request assistance.

We received approval to repatriate the brothers, but the addition of the parents complicated things.  The brothers complicated things even more. In spite of the likelihood that we would not receive approval to pay for the parents' return, the boys kept upping the ante. They insisted that we repatriate them via ship instead of by plane because, they said, their parents were afraid to fly.

By this time, it seemed clear that they knew we weren't going to repatriate all four of them, and that we wouldn't agree to send them back by boat. But they had started the process, so they had to follow through. The smiles on their faces gave away that they were just playing a game. Or so I thought.

Image of Mercedes Benz by pilot_micha, via Flickr.com

As suddenly as they appeared, they disappeared. They never returned to find out if we would book their return via ship. But we did hear more about them later. They turned up at another consulate in Germany. I think they had a new story and a new request. The details are not in my memory. What I do remember is that the brothers and their parents had been sleeping in two brand new Mercedes Benz vehicles which they probably purchased in Stuttgart, the heart of Mercedes Benz manufacturing.

They must have run out of money before they could ship them to the U.S.

Day 179 - More Prison Blues

Another American I visited in a German prison, Mark,* was charged with a much more serious offense - murder. He explained to me that went out one night to a bar, drank so much that his memory was blank for a portion of the evening. He didn't remember meeting a woman in the bar. He didn't remember taking her home. And he didn't remember murdering her. He had no memory of the woman. He really, really didn't think he should be charged with murder when he couldn't remember what happened to him. I don't know how he would have felt about a guilty by reason of loss of memory option. What he really wanted was not to be charged because he couldn't remember. But he had been found guilty. I had a hard time feeling much sympathy for him, but it was important for me not to let him know how I felt.

I visited Mark more than once. My responsibility was entirely to make sure he wasn't being mistreated and that he had access to legal representation. I wasn't his advocate in the legal system, just as a American citizen in prison. But he didn't fit the image of a hardened criminal. He was a former GI who was stationed in Germany where he met his wife so that he stayed in Germany with her after he got out of the Army. He didn't claim to have any problems with his wife. He claimed he wasn't having an affair. He claims that he only remembers going out for a few beers.

Later, he was arrested, tried, and convicted for murder.

Now this is a time when the curious person in me would have asked him a lot of questions about what happened, to be able to at least describe, if not solve, the mystery. But taking the conversation in that direction might look to Mark as though I was there to help his defense. So instead our conversations were short, focused on how he was doing. He didn't spend most of his time in a cell, unlike what TV programs show. Instead, he, like all other prisoners, had time to watch TV, read books, as well as working in the prison.

There were going to be a lot of consular officers in the future who would end up visiting Mark in prison. Maybe they still are.

The third American I recall visiting in prison was also a former GI, Jerome*, who remained behind in Germany, although I don't recall whether he also married a German. I learned more from him about the circumstances of life in prison from him since he had many complaints about his treatment. Jerome described the work he did at the prison for which he earned a small amount of money. His complaint was that he couldn't buy what he needed in the shop where his earnings could be used because they did not stock products for African hair. My boss usually picked up the products she knew he wanted and gave them to him, through me.

I don't know, or don't remember, anything more about Jerome's circumstances. I think that means I was doing my job, assessing whether he was being treated well without getting involved in any way.

*a name, not necessarily the right one

Day 178 - Jailhouse Blues

An occasional responsibility for consular officers involved visits to American citizens in prison. Fortunately, these were rare in Germany. Even more fortunately, German prisons are much nicer than prisons in many other parts of the world.

Image of prison by kIM DARam, via Flickr.com

During my training for consular work, we did a lot of role playing. The location was Congen Rosslyn, the name given to the suite of offices that were set up to look a lot like what we would find when we arrived on the job. Rosslyn was a section of Arlington County in Virginia where most of the Foreign Service Institute's courses were held at the time I arrived in Washington. Congen Rosslyn took its name from the location, but it was transformed into the capital of the mythical country of Z. During our role playing, one of us would act as the prisoner, one as the consular officer, and the course instructor and the other ConGen students would observe. At the conclusion of the role playing exercise, we would discuss the scenario. The consular officer and prisoner role players would describe how they felt during the exercise and the observers commented on whether they thought the scenario would have a positive outcome if the situation had been real.

I was surprised that my fellow classmates all commented on how cool and detached I appeared during the role playing. I thought I was being very sympathetic.

When I made my first prison visit, I didn't have the benefit of an observer to let me know afterwards how I did, except that I had to write up a report to send to Washington to ensure headquarters knew we were fulfilling our obligation towards imprisoned Americans.

The first American I visited, Bruno,* was born in Germany of a German mother and an American citizen father. At the time he was born, Germany did not consider the children of German mothers to be German citizens; Germany considered that a child's citizenship was derived through the father. In Bruno's case, his father was American of Yugoslav origin. The importance of this detail comes later.

Bruno was in prison because he had overstayed his visa in Germany. He had grown up in Germany, so he considered himself German, not American. He barely spoke English and that fact meant that he often was thought to be carrying a false passport when the police stopped him for one thing or another and he handed over his American passport as his proof of identification. His mother had died, so he was living on his own in Germany, unable to get German citizenship through a change in the law that might have made it possible for him to take advantage of a provision for certain German women to petition on behalf of their children to obtain German citizenship in spite of their fathers not being German. His mother would have had to petition on his behalf, and she wasn't there. His father also wasn't in Germany. He had returned to the United States where he was prepared to welcome Bruno in spite of the fact that he had done so once before when Bruno had been deported from Germany, but Bruno hadn't adjusted well to life in the United States so he returned to Germany. And that led to his overstaying his visa, being found in the country without permission and then put into prison. Bruno was facing deportation to the United States for a second time.

Bruno thought the solution to his problem would be to renounce his American citizenship. According to his thinking, if he wasn't an American citizen, he couldn't be deported, so he would be able to stay in Germany. He would have to apply for a Stateless person's travel document, but that was preferable to being deported. But Bruno wasn't considering his father's situation clearly enough. His father, though an American citizen, was also very likely also a Yugoslav citizen. There are many countries in the world which do not consider it possible for its citizens to stop being a citizen. Since his father was born in Yugoslavia to parents who were both Yugoslav citizens, the Yugoslav government might consider both his father, and through his blood line also Bruno, to be Yugoslav citizens. If Bruno renounced his American citizenship, he couldn't be deported to the United States. But the German government might instead decide to deport him to Yugoslavia, a country where he knew no one, where the language was completely unfamiliar to him, and where his life would likely be much more difficult than it was in Germany or had been for the year he spent in the United States.

My mission was to meet with Bruno and talk with him about the consequences of renouncing his citizenship. While my boss didn't tell me outright that my job was to talk him out of renouncing his citizenship, it seemed clear that she thought Bruno would be better off being deported to the United States than giving up his citizenship and not having any control at all over what happened next.

Since Bruno's English was very weak, he and I talked about his situation in German. I asked him questions and listened to his answers. I didn't tell him what I thought he should do. I just asked him questions, hoping he would come to his own decision not to renounce his citizenship. I was very pleased at the end of the visit when Bruno agreed that he would not insist on renouncing his citizenship.

When I returned to the Consulate, I happily reported the results of my meeting with Bruno to my boss. She just smiled. At the end of my story, she admitted that Bruno always changed his mind by the end of a consular prison visit. She said I had done a good job. But I walked away knowing that the next consular officer would probably have to go through the same conversation with Bruno, unless the German government finally deported him in the meantime.

Day 176 - Name Checks

A final hurdle that visa applicants had to get over was the requirement of a clean result from a name check. Clean in this case means no derogatory information. No information was as good as nothing derogatory, but it was essential that the name checks be completed accurately. In later years, a consular officer in Sudan came in for some severe criticism when it was discovered that she had issued a visa to Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, better known in the U.S. as the Blind Sheikh from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. His name was on the terrorist watch list which should have prevented his being issued a visa of any kind. So no information was only good if the name being checked had been entered properly. In countries where names are spelled in a non-Latin alphabet, the transliteration of the names into English is tricky which results in more hits suggesting possible derogatory information than is accurate. In those cases, consular officers must satisfy themselves that the hit doesn't apply to the specific individual applying for a visa - a challenge in countries where names like Mohammed, Abdullah, Nasser, Ahmed, and the like are common and where second names are the fathers' names, making Mohammed Nasser and Abdullah Ahmed nearly as common.

I can understand why the consular officer in Sudan could have made a mistake even when the Blind Sheikh's name was on the terrorist watch list. The second piece of information used to determine if the name check result applies to the applicant is birthdate and in the Arab world, the calendar used is lunar, based on the moon, which means each year is 11 days shorter than solar calendars. It is tricky to equate a lunar year date in one year with the solar year date. And with incomplete birth records on top of that, it turns out that many people's birth dates are listed as January 1 because there is no way to be more precise than the year of birth.

Image of sign at Auschwitz by agati, via Flickr.com

In Germany we didn't face quite such a daunting task when we received a response from the name check that the applicant might be ineligible for a visa. There are about 35 grounds for ineligibility. The laws have changed since I served as a consular officer so I'm not sure of the precise number then. If an applicant was found to be ineligible on the basis of one of these grounds, that didn't necessarily mean they could not enter the United States for a temporary purpose. If an applicant was ineligible, there were provisions for a waiver of the ineligibility to be issued in most of the cases. But not all. At the time I was in Germany, there were a few permanent ineligibilities, one of which was having been involved in the persecution of persons in the concentration camps during World War II. This came up often when the name check results were derogatory.

While having served in the German military was not sufficient grounds for an applicant to be ineligible, all names of German soldiers during World War II were in the name check database. Until a few years prior to my arrival in Germany, nearly every former German soldier during World War II was found ineligible under a provision that allowed a waiver to be issued. So occasionally we would receive applications from German men of the right age who knew their applications would require some time to process. One was Manfred,* whose daughter was an American citizen. He had traveled to see her every few years since she emigrated to the United States and each time he had to obtain a waiver. So he wasn't surprised this time when we invited him in for an interview. But what he didn't know was that the law had changed so that the result of the interview would either be that he no longer ever had to obtain a waiver again because his service in the German military would not rise to the level of the permanent ineligibility or that he would be permanently ineligible. Even active members of the Communist party weren't permanently ineligible, so this was a big deal. We interviewed him and sent in the report and then we waited. And we waited. And waited. By the time we got the response from the Washington, Manfred had died.

Manfred's case was very frustrating for me because we had othere applicants who were neither as understanding nor as pleasant as Manfred. Klaus,* for example, when interviewed by Elizabeth, the senior local employee, leaned across the desk and nearly yelled at her, asking, "Don't you know who I am? How important I am? One phone call is all I would need to make you disappear." And yet he was deemed to not be ineligible.

We never did understand just who he was.

Another case, Dieter,* applied for his visa with a Danish passport. He knew about the ineligibility and he thought he would be able to disguise his past with the German military by taking Danish citizenship through his wife and applying with a fresh passport. But name checks aren't keyed off citizenship; names, date and place of birth were all we needed. Dieter wasn't unpleasant like Klaus, but neither was he as understanding as Manfred. He was willing to wait, but not too long. I. The end, he, too, was found not to be subject to the ineligibility and was issued a visa.

*a name, not necessarily the right one.

Day 177 - Suspicious Minds

One consequence of Germans not being very good liars is that Germans were also very trusting of one another. And that meant it was difficult for the local German staff to trust their instincts about when others were not being entirely truthful.

One exception was Ruth. She had a knack for identifying applicants who weren't telling us the whole truth. If we issued a visa to someone Ruth thought was a poor risk, the proof would take months, if not years, to prove her correct. The proof was something we called a blue sheet. Blue sheets were the copy of the request for adjustment of status that the Immigration and Naturalization Service sent to consular sections when someone who had entered the U.S. on a non-immigrant visa subsequently applied to adjust their status to permanent residence. When I issued a visa that Ruth thought was a bad risk, she would write "SOML" at the bottom of the application. That stood for "Sandra owes me lunch." If a blue sheet arrived corresponding to an applicant with that note on the bottom, I agreed I would take Ruth to lunch. I never had to, but that doesn't mean Ruth was wrong. It just meant that none of the blue sheets turned up before I left Germany.

Image of engagement ring by LJ Mears, via Flickr.com

There was one case of blue sheets that was normal: fiance visas. A fiance visa involved nearly everything that an immigrant visa required, medical tests and police clearances, for example, but it was issued to a non-American before a marriage. The visa allowed the non-American to travel to the U.S. in order to get married, provided the marriage took place within 90 days (or maybe it was as few as 45 days). Once the marriage took place, it was expected that the non-American spouse would apply to change status from non-immigrant to permanent resident. So a blue sheet from INS didn't automatically mean something irregular had happened.

But it usually did. When we issued a tourist visa to someone who then married a U.S. citizen and applied to change their status shortly thereafter, it was usually evidence that the applicant had planned to stay in the U.S. all along. So we would pull the applicant's file to see if there was evidence that we were deliberately misled. We would provide a response to indicate what information the applicant provided and then INS would make a decision whether to approve the application for adjustment of status. We didn't learn what they decided, so we only saw the middle, or sometimes the beginning and the middle, of the story.

But more often, the blue sheets didn't arrive until at least a year after the applicant arrived in the U.S. The longer the passage of time, the more difficult it was to prove one way or the other what the applicant's intention was when the visa was issued.

We Americans also had some trouble trusting ourselves to be the right level of suspicious vs. trusting. One morning, for example, my colleague John received a phone call that stunned him. The caller said he was an American citizen who overheard a conversation in the lobby of his hotel the day before. The conversation involved an American and an Iranian who frequently translated for Iranian applicants who explained to the American that he had a special arrangement with one of the consular officers in Stuttgart that would ensure the American's friend would get a visa. The caller wanted to complain about the consular officer and probably thought he was getting through to the head of the consular section, not one of the consular officers. John asked the caller a couple of additional questions to identify the Iranian translator. From the description, John realized first, the translator was in the visa waiting area at that moment, and second, the Iranian meant he, John, was the consular officer the Iranian referred to. John realized he had often relied on the translator and had often issued visas to the applicants he had translated for. And that meant John was upset with himself for not listening more critically. He was much more willing to accept the explanations from Iranian applicants than I was, but each consular officer is responsible for making his or her own decisions.

When the translator came up to the interview window with his applicant, John explained that he would no longer welcome the translator to represent applicants and that meant that the applicant would have to find someone else to translate for him, or he would have to answer questions himself in either English or German.

That applicant went away and had to come back another day.

Day 175 - The Truth Shall Set You Free

Image of Rajneesh Shree Bhagwan materials,
by timogan via Flickr.com

I represented the Consulate General at a demonstration in Stuttgart one day. The event - a protest march by followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh who had established an intentional community (aka commune) outside the town of Antelope, Oregon. The community was known as Rajneeshpuram. By 1984, the year before I arrived in Stuttgart, Rajneeshpuram was a city of up to 7,000 people, complete with typical urban infrastructure such as a fire department, police, restaurants, malls, townhouses, a 4,200-foot (1,300 m) airstrip, a public transport system using buses, a sewage reclamation plant and a reservoir. The Rajneeshpuram post office had ZIP code 97741 and it quickly outgrew the size of Antelope itself.

Followers were known as Rajneeshees and for some reason a lot of Germans were drawn to the movement. Rajneeshees were identifiable by the yellow, orange, or red clothing they wore. When they applied for a permit to demonstrate their disappointment with the Consulate's reputation for looking on applicants from Germany who wished to travel to Rajneeshpuram to take part in the Bhagwan's training programs unfavorably, the police informed the Consul General, and he designated me to meet them. It wouldn't have been appropriate for him to meet with them as his stature might encourage someone to believe the protest was being taken seriously. With me, the most junior level American staff member of the Consulate General, to greet them, there would be no such misunderstanding. I was advised to say nothing, just take what they had to give me and then come back into the building.

The Rajneeshees assessment of the Consular Section was accurate. We didn't issue visas to Rajneeshees who applied for tourist visas to travel to take part in a training program that didn't have specific start or end dates. Rajneeshpuram wasn't a recognized educational institution, so they couldn't issue the I-20 form required for us to issue student visas. It wasn't a recognized exchange program organization, so they couldn't issue the IAP-66 form required for us to issue an exchange program visa. About the only category of visa that would work for Rajneeshees who wanted to travel to Antelope, Oregon, was an immigrant visa. But we didn't issue immigrant visas. In addition, immigrant visas are issued on the basis of categories, most of which are for family reunification. Even if a German Rajneeshee had a sponsor for an immigrant visa, they would fall into a category that would mean a many year wait for his or her name to come to the top of the list.

When the demonstrators arrived at the Consulate General, I went out to meet them to accept their letter of complaint and a large bunch of flowers. I was a little disappointed that they didn't bring an elephant to their protest march that year. I had been told in the past they had always arrived with an elephant.

Image of Church of Scientology
by spaceninja, via Flickr.com

Another near-cult-like group that sponsored applicants to travel to the United States for training was the Church of Scientology. I didn't know much about Scientologists before I arrived in Germany, but I got to know a lot about them very quickly. Adjudicating their visa cases was much more challenging because they had managed to get blanket approval for clergymen from the church to travel to the United States for extended stays. That meant that each of them applied for a different class of visa, a work visa, not a tourist visa. And since the Immigration and Naturalization Service had issued blanket approval for clergymen, we were left with determining whether the applicants qualified as clergymen.

One memorable applicant was not yet 18 years old. Dietrich* applied under the blanket petition as a clergyman. He had already traveled to Clearwater, Florida, one of the centers for Scientology, and completed some of the church's training. He wanted to return to Florida in order to complete more training and take up duties as a clergyman.

About the time Dietrich arrived for his interview, his grandmother was on the phone to beg us not to issue him a visa. She said Dietrich's parents were supportive of his desire to travel to the United States, but he had already dropped out of high school in Germany to make the trip and she worried that he would never succeed without completing his education.

His grandmother was probably worrying for no reason. One of the qualities I recognized in all applicants who wanted to travel for further Scientology training was their self-confidence. I had little doubt that Dietrich was going to succeed at whatever he put his mind to. But since he was still a minor, traveling to Clearwater as a minister of the Church of Scientology was not in his cards yet. I advised him to complete his education in Germany and then consider at a later age whether his future was still with Scientology.

Another applicant whose arrival coincided with a phone call from a worried relative, Manuela,* wanted to travel to New York so that she could be a volunteer with Covenant House, a program devoted to providing support for homeless children, many of whom had been abused or were abusing illegal substances. Covenant House operated with the assistance of hundreds of volunteers who paid their way to the cities where their houses were located and who lived with the children resident there. Volunteers received no payment.

This was not my first introduction to Covenant House as I learned about it during my summer in New Jersey when five of my fellow volunteers with the Christian Neighborhood Summer Program met a young woman from Georgia who had run away from her parents and made her way to New York. We six bleeding heart liberals from across the midwest tried to find a safe place for her to stay that night. A surreptitious telephone call to the New York Police by one of our group led to the tip that she might be able to stay at Covenant House, but when they learned she said she was 19, they told us she was too old.

Then just before I ended up joining the State Department, a friend in Minneapolis told me he had decided to sell lhis house and use the proceeds of the sale to fund a year of volunteering with Covenant House. So while Manuela wanted to volunteer, I had a pretty good idea of just what it was going to cost her to volunteer. I had already spoken to her mother who told us she opposed Manuela's plans. Because I hadn't yet met Manuela, I explained to the mother that I could only make a decision based on what Manuela presented, especially since it was clear that Manuela was no longer a minor. I asked Manuela how she expected to pay her expenses in New York since her parents wouldn't be helping her. She downplayed the amount of money she thought she would need and that was the basis for my refusing her application - she didn't have adequate funds for the purpose of the trip.

Whitney Museum of Modern Art by beautifulcataya,
via Flickr.com

The most memorable of applicants who applied to spend a year in the United States was Elke.* Elke applied to spend a year in New York on an internship with the Whitney Museum for the year after the conclusion of her university studies in the U.S. A fifth year in the U.S. was common for foreign students, but it required an exchange visitor visa or an extension of the student visa. In Elke's case, the internship was organized through Max Factor, not a university, so an exchange visitor visa is what she needed. Elke initially submitted her application through the mail, but since she didn't have an IAP-66 form, needed for us to issue an Exchange Visitor visa, we sent her application and passport back to her with a form telling her she should reapply when she received an IAP-66. Instead, Elke returned and presented the letter she received from the Whitney Museum that explained they weren't approved for issuing IAP-66 forms. The woman who wrote the letter explained that other foreign students who spent an internship year with the museum were willing to hide their intended purpose at the time they applied for visas as they felt the opportunity was too good to pass up. She further suggested that Elke might try getting a new passport and then reapplying in person, wearing a scarf and coat so that no one at the consulate would recognize her from her previous application.

Elke refused to lie. She presented all her documents with her application and asked us what she was supposed to do. The employee who took her application at the window handed the package over to Elizabeth, the senior local employee in the Visa Section. Elizabeth read through everything and brought the package to me to ask if I thought the Whitney Museum was connected in any way to our boss whose last name was Whitney. We brought the package to Ms. Whitney who read through everything and then began laughing a bit and said, "Dear Aunt Gertrude" while shaking her head. She volunteered to talk with the applicant and then she got on the phone with her extended family to explain what they needed to do to get on the list of organizations approved to issue IAP-66 forms so that Elke could join their internship group in September.

Elke returned a week later with an IAP-66. We were happy to issue her visa.

*A name, not necessarily the right one.

Day 174 - Lies Have Short Legs

Germans aren't very good at lying. That made our jobs easier in many ways. But as I mentioned before, lying isn't grounds for refusing a visa application. It just makes it harder to figure out what the real story is.

Before I arrived in Stuttgart, it was well known that a previous consular officer there never issued visas to German women who had GI boyfriends. Never. So German women with GI boyfriends learned that telling the truth wouldn't work. But unlike the situation with applicants wanting to spend a year in the U.S. as an au pair, there was nothing illegal about a German woman traveling to the U.S. with her American boyfriend. The key was the purpose of the trip. If it was to remain in the U.S., a tourist visa wasn't the appropriate category. But if it was for a vacation, there was no problem.

Except that German women thought they couldn't tell us the truth.

Image by arteunpooro, via Flickr.com

My favorite example was Ursula.* She arrived at the interview window with her hair a mess, too much make-up, and wearing clothes that left so much of her exposed she should have been embarrassed. But she wasn't. She explained that she wanted to travel to the United States for the Christmas holidays. She had an invitation from an American woman, Mrs. Brown,* Ursula said she had met the previous summer when Mrs. Brown was in Germany on vacation. She said she and Mrs. Brown hit it off right away and she had spent a lot of time showing Mrs. Brown around Germany. She also said that Mrs. Brown had sent her a present recently, so she was very much looking forward to seeing her again. Ursula was about 20. She said Mrs. Brown was about 50.

I was having a hard time understanding how this ditzy blonde had managed to charm a middle-aged woman to the point that she would invite her to spend two weeks over the Christmas holidays. Christmas is for spending time with families, not strangers.

So I suggested to Ursula that I could better understand her reasons for traveling to the U.S. for the Christmas holidays if Mrs. Brown were the mother of her American boyfriend. At that Ursula said she didn't have a boyfriend in the United States. In fact, she said, her boyfriend was the Marine on duty at the Consulate right now. I had seen her talking with Cliff, the Marine on duty, so I thought it might be possible. I went into the office and called Cliff to ask how long he had known Ursula. His response - he had known her for just as long as I had.

At this point, it seemed hopeless to think I would get Ursula to change her story. So I refused her visa application. When we didn't issue a visa, we stamped the back of the passport with a notation that we had received an application and we wrote in the date. It wasn't always an indication that the application had been refused. Sometimes it just meant that we needed more information or documentation before we could issue a visa. But most people understand it means the visa was refused. I am sure that Ursula understood that. But she had a lot of nerve.

A few days after I refused her application, my boss got a phone call from an American GI in Illinois. He wanted to know why the airline in Frankfurt wouldn't allow his fiancee to get on the plane. They told her they wouldn't accept her visa. Ursula was trying to convince the airline that the stamp in the back of her passport was her visa. I don't know if Ursula ever got to the U.S. or if her boyfriend/fiance returned to Germany for her. Consular officers only get to know the beginning of most stories.

Image by summerbl4ck, via Flickr.com

Another favorite was Brigitta*. I had seen her sitting in the back row of the waiting room with two children and a tall man when I began interviewing applicants that day. Brigitta was older than Ursula and therefore at least a bit more believable. But still her story didn't quite make sense. She also said she planned to travel to the United States for the Christmas holidays. She also planned to visit someone she had met in Germany who had invited her to spend the holidays. I asked if she was traveling with anyone else. She said she wasn't. I asked why she would leave her children behind in Germany over the holidays. She said her children would be staying with her ex-husband.

She had answers to all my questions, but it still didn't quite make sense. So, just as I had done with Ursula, I told Brigitta that I could understand her reason for wanting to travel to the U.S. with just a few changes to her explanation. I could see that her children adored the man she was with. They were sitting next to him, taking turns giving him a hug. And he seemed to be very comfortable with them. So I could understand her story if she told me he was her American boyfriend and that the two of them were planning to travel to the U.S. for the Christmas holidays to spend them with his family.

At that point, Brigitta told me a German saying, "Lügen haben kurze Beine." Lies have short legs. She said she thought she wouldn't get a visa if she admitted that she would be traveling with her American boyfriend. I asked if he was in the Army. He was. I asked if he was being transferred back to the U.S. He wasn't. He just had two weeks of leave for the holidays.

I issued Brigitta a visa for her Christmas holiday. Lies may have short legs, but they don't prevent visa from being issued unless the lies are intentional and material to the question of eligibility.

*A name, not necessarily the right one.