As I'm writing this I'm making a mental checklist of what to pack to go to India (my flight leaves…read morein 5 hours!). I'm going to India tonight only because the people at American Visa of DC are efficient and competent. Last week, in a state of panic, my family and I realized that my visa to travel to India was not valid and I needed to apply for a new one. We had already bought our tickets and we scarily came to terms that we had only 5 business days to get my visa application to DC, for the Indian Embassy to process it in time, and send it back to us before our flight left tonight. Also since I'm considered a person of Indian Origin by the Indian Government, I automatically have to apply for an "entry visa," which is more expensive than a tourist visa and requires more documentation (they needed a copy of my birth certificate amongst other things, I was born in India!). We all had the same reaction that there wasn't enough time to get the application to the Embassy and for it to process before we left. We all were worried that I'd have to change my flight. Through the panic, my brilliant sister intervened and gave me a list of courier companies that I could pay to deal with the visa application submission instead of traveling all the way from Charlotte to DC, and American Visa of DC being one of them. I had called a couple of the companies on the list last Wednesday and the response I kept getting was there wasn't enough time and there was nothing I could do to get my visa processed in time, my only option being to change my flight date (costing a minimum of $500). Then I got on the phone with Benjie at American Visa of DC and hope was installed. He was calm and collected, even after listening to my hysteria, and seemed really familiar with Indian visas. He told me to fed ex my application overnight and they would take care of dropping the application and picking it up for me, then he said they'd fed ex it overnight back to me. I was ecstatic and jumped on getting all the docs together and fed ex'ed it to him. I sent him the package last Wednesday and it was supposed to get to him on Thursday morning. Unfortunately with my luck, the plane that my package was on had a mechanical error and the delivery got delayed until Friday morning, which meant fewer business days for the visa to get processed. After this, I was confident I would have to change my flight and that my visa would not come through, that I stalled on packing and started looking at later flights. In the interim, I still, per insistence by my parents, kept calling American Visa for status updates on my visa. I talked to Samantha a few times and I'm sure she had a lot of other things to do, but she patiently looked into my record and kept me up to speed with where the visa was at. Lastly, I talked to Moses a few times as well and also got a positive response that they were working on it.
Then last night Moses called me and gave me music to my ears - my visa was ready and they were going to fed ex it overnight so I'd get it around 10am today. He even promised to email me the tracking number, which I got from Monique. This morning, I looked out my window and saw the fed ex van and ran to it like kids to an ice cream truck. Inside that lovely white envelope was my passport, in a nice laminated cover, courtesy of American Visa of DC, and inside my passport, the visa stamp! It arrived nine hours before I'm supposed to fly out! Halleluiah!
Thank you, thank you, thank you, American Visa of DC, you guys are life savers!
