Visa Problems

 Visa Problems 

When you think of traveling, what is the first thing that comes to mind? All the places you want to see? Well, that is not the case for me anymore. I think, will I get a visa? I have had the privilege of traveling to many places during my life because of the work my father does, and I always thought it was easy. You just hop on a plane and that's it. That is certainly not it. 

I am a Finnish student currently studying in the US. This is something that I wanted to do for years, and last spring I was blessed when I got the opportunity to do so. I had everything ready to go except for one thing. My student visa. I thought to myself, I don't need to worry about that yet, I've been to the US before, I'll have no problems getting a student visa. 

For context, this was still in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, many places were still closed, including the US embassy in Helsinki, Finland where I needed to have an interview for my student visa. It was around early June when I first looked at their website to book an interview time. When I logged onto the website my jaw almost hit the floor. "Next available appointment: February 23rd, 2022". I was supposed to start school and hockey in the US in late August, and here I am with no appointment times until the next year. This is when the panic started to kick in a little. 

For the next month, I was calling and sending emails to anyone and everyone at the embassy daily just hoping for someone to answer. Nothing. I could not get anything but automated messages back. My father whole works for a Finnish Embassy even tried sending emails several times with nothing but the same generic messages back as well. Even my younger brother who is a US citizen called the emergency number several times, but still, we could not get anyone to answer. I even drove to the embassy and pleaded my case to the security guards on duty. They obviously did not let me in. I was out of options. 

Then, out of nowhere, my mother just posted in a Facebook group with other parents who have children studying abroad about the problem we were having, not really expecting anything to come of it. Then one summer day I was working when my phone started getting bombarded with texts and phone calls from my mother. I thought, what is wrong? Who is hurt? Luckily, no one was hurt, but my mother said that someone had replied to her post saying that their daughter was having the same visa problem. My mother got in touch with her and she said that her daughter had flown to another European country, one with a US embassy that was open. That same day, I got back on the US Embassy website and found a country with an available interview time before I had to leave for the US. I was shocked, I never thought that my mother's post on Facebook would be the thing that would save me from this situation. 

A week later I was on a flight to Bucharest, Romania. A place I never thought I would be going to just so I could get into the US. I was in Romania for four days, my interview was on the first day, then I had to wait for my visa to be processed. For three days, I was sitting in the hotel, working out lounging by the pool. Was I bored? Yes. Did I care? No. I knew this is what I had to do to get to the US. I would have loved to explore the city a little more, but trying to be careful to not get covid, and the fact that I got scammed by the first taxi driver I had, I was happy to just stay at the hotel and wait it out. A couple days later, I was on a flight back to Finland with a US student visa.

I never imagined that I would have to go through all this work just to go study in another country. Obviously, the pandemic made the situation significantly more difficult, but in hindsight, this whole situation was ridiculous. The fact that a random stranger saved me because of a Facebook post was incredible to me. The fact that technology has given us humans the opportunity to connect with loved ones and strangers anywhere around the world is amazing. If we did not have the technology we have today, I might have never known about the possibility of going to another country to get my visa. I could have missed most, if not the whole of my freshman year of college. For this, I am grateful to the stranger who went out of their way to help me, and I am grateful for the technology that I am lucky to have that has given me the possibility to connect with so many people all around the world.