The Visa Catastrophe

In my GYLC blog, I mentioned an incident that I have dubbed ‘The Visa Catastrophe’ and promised that I would post a full blog on it soon.

The time has come, young ones.

Warning: The following story is an entirely true account of the events of Friday, 20 June 2014. Content may be stress-inducing to those who are about to travel/are currently travelling. Stay safe.

My parents are probably going to hate me even more for posting this, and the people who know us personally may, too, because I swear my mother has told the account in excruciating detail to every single person we know. Multiple times.

Whatever.

The Victim's Account:

It is the morning of Friday, 20 June 2014, and a teeny tiny piece of poo hits the proverbial fan in my house when I wake up in a frenzy, having realized that my American visa should and would still be in my old passport. It is the day before I am scheduled to leave for GYLC, and I have planned everything down to the last band aid I might need if I happen to get mauled by a rabid squirrel (you never know). I have no idea where my old passport is, but this is largely due to the fact that my parents (ironically) insist on keeping all of our passports in case we lose them. Ha. That turned out well.

Fifteen minutes until I have to leave for school, and we still haven’t found it. I am close to tears, the house is a mess, my dad is throwing a fit, and my mom decides to come in with the only piece of calm advice that I foolishly trust and allow to subdue me by a fraction.

“Don’t worry, sweetie. It must be somewhere, because I checked your visa when you asked me to.”

So I am hauled off to school, still slightly freaked out and tearful and ready to climb back into bed. It would be just so fitting that I have an English unprepared speech and a Maths test scheduled for that Friday, and the frame of mind I am in doesn’t exactly help me with mentally preparing for either of those very well.

Fast forward to 10:00. At this point, a slightly larger piece of poo hits the proverbial fan. It’s the end of tea break and I’m about to walk into my Maths test when I see my dad’s car in the parking lot. Not good, for two reasons. Firstly: my dad never comes to our school during the day. Ever. I think it has something to do with him being freaked out by education in general. Secondly: on the odd occasion that my dad did decide to come to my school in the middle of the day, it would probably be because I was in trouble. Of course, the second option is extremely unlikely, seeing as I pretty much have a the reputation of a nun at school, but it still didn’t fail to cross my mind that maybe I’d been expelled for something. I don’t even know what I’d be expelled for. Like I said before: nun status.

Anyway, my dad found me right before I went into my test, and decided that just then was the perfect time to tell me that they’d found my visa, but it had expired four years ago. Four years.

Flashback to that morning: “It must be somewhere, because I checked your visa when you asked me to.”

Flashback to December: “Mom, please check that my visa will still be valid.”

Flashback to January: “Mom, you said my visa’s valid, right?”

Flashback to February: “Amy, for crying out loud, I said I checked your visa! Stop being paranoid!”

Flashback to March: “Amy, I swear if you ask me if I checked your visa one more time I’ll send you to an orphanage.”

Flashback to April: “Amy, I’m going to send your visa through the shredder if you ask me to check it one more time.”

Flashback to May: “Amy, I’m sending you to a psychologist if you don’t stop being so paranoid. I said I checked your visa.”

*sound of a nuclear explosion in my head*

*cue the waterworks*

Turns out that my mom actually just checked her own visa instead of mine, and assumed mine would also be valid until the end of 2015… Not so much.

(I got out of my unprepared speech, for the record, because I was in ‘an unfit state of mind’. Shoutout to my spokesperson. You know who you are.)

Fast forward to 14:30. Elephant poo gets chucked at the proverbial fan continually for about forty-eight hours straight. I get home, climb out the car, and pretty much don’t stop crying until Monday morning.

A Happy Ending:

For the whole of Friday, my parents were on the phone to the American Embassy trying to get me an emergency appointment for an emergency visa. Eventually, my dad got hold of what he assumes was actually the C.I.A. and begged them to get me an appointment. I received one for Monday morning at 7:30.

The appointment was literally fifteen minutes. I walked in at like 7:10, went through a bizarre security check, got my name called at 7:30 and talked to a really nice woman for approximately three minutes. She told me to collect my visa that afternoon. I hopped on a plane that evening, and made it to GYLC by lunchtime on Tuesday.

Lessons I learned from this experience:

1. 1.     Always check your own visa.
2. 2.     Paranoia is always a good thing.
3. 3.     Crying gets you everywhere in life.
4. 4.     Don’t try and take an mp3 player into the American Embassy. They will assume it’s a bomb.

Plus side to the Visa Catastrophe: If I want to run away, I can go to America first and it will take my parents months to be able to follow me because I am now the only person in my entire family with a valid American Visa until 2024. Also, given my family’s apparent unpreparedness for even the most planned-for situations, it will take them years to be able to catch up with me anyway.

(Note: Please don’t think I hate my parents. We’re on good terms now, especially seeing as they righted everything that went wrong. They’ve also done a lot of sucking up since… Also, I’m now semi-officially the new leader of our house. And they’re paying for my new band merchandise because they feel guilty. It’s been a great life since I got back.)

Global Young Leaders Conference – June/July 2014

From late June to early July this year, I was privileged enough to attend the annual Global Young Leaders Conference (GYLC) in Washington and New York, and I can confidently say it was one of the most incredible, memorable and beneficial experiences of my entire (albeit short) life.

Before I begin outlining all my adventures and fails (there were many), I just want to thank the people that encouraged (forced) me to hop on that plane and go off on my own to Washington. Because, in all honesty, I was so not excited to leave South Africa and spend my only holiday of a three-month term at a leadership conference, debating and arguing with some of the smartest kids in the world. Actually, I was freaked out of my mind. We’ll get to the lesson I learned about “being careful what you wish for” later.

From the Envision website and the letters I received from the advisors at the conference, GYLC seems like some super-serious, hectic, boring conference where the attendees draft proposals for world peace and start making plans to run for president. The pictures online are filled with serious-looking people leaning over serious-looking sheets of paper and chewing on the backs of pens as though their brains are about to explode from all the serious thought that is going down.

GYLC is so far from that. In fact, when I look back on my expectations I laugh so hard that my sides start to hurt and I start crying. It even makes me want to start using the word “lolz” out loud… Yuck.

There are some of my expectations that weren’t far from the truth. For example, we did have to wear professional clothing for about half of the time, which meant that I broke the bank and my mother’s sanity buying endless supplies of blazers and skirts. Do you know how hard it is to shop for a teenage girl whose standard items of clothing include her battered Converse, faded jeans and most probably a beanie? It’s hard. Throwing blazers into the equation makes it near impossible. And my father’s endless lectures on why I wasn’t allowed to take my Green Day ‘American Idiot’ tour T-shirt made it even worse.

Shopping wasn’t even the worst part about the preparations. Remember when I dared to use that awful cliché: “Be careful what you wish for”? Cringe. But it’s the only thing that can really sum up one of the two lessons I learned from what I like to call “The Visa Catastrophe”. The second one is that my parents should never question my paranoia ever again. I’m going to sum it up here, but do not fret; there will be a long blog about the entire experience in explicit detail coming soon. (I’ll post the link here.) Basically my dearest mother didn’t check my American visa properly, and the day before I was due to leave we discovered that it had expired four years ago. So I had to get an emergency visa and arrive to the conference a day late, not to mention that I had to fly all on my lonesome ownsome next to some Chinese man who I’m pretty sure was carrying some extreme form of swine flu. It was disgusting.

Oh, and then when I arrived at the airport in Washington, some little American girl from Alabama (who I ended up sitting next to when I insisted on switching seats, and who kept asking me things like, “So, like, do you go to school in buildings?” Bless her soul…) led me to the wrong terminal. This wouldn’t have been so bad if we were in a South African airport, but apparently American airports are the size of a small city. I had to catch a train to get to the right terminal, just like how in S.A. I have to catch a train to get from my house to the airport. Holy alien babies.

I got to the conference, though (shoutout to Chris, who picked me up from the airport and was an absolute miracle worker) and had a slight mental break down when I was alone in my room (my roommates were in a lecture so I had the shower to myself for 15 whole minutes – unheard of for the rest of the conference). I really had nothing to worry about. As soon as I walked into the hotel’s ballroom where lunch was being served, my friends spotted me and got me settled in. I had to explain the Visa Catastrophe about three hundred times, but I didn’t even mind.

There were over three hundred teenagers attending the conference from all over the world. I hadn’t even heard of some of the places they came from (not a surprise seeing as Geography was the first subject I dropped), like Kuwait. What? Kuwait? Like Kuai, the restaurant that serves wraps and smoothies? Nope… Like the country, dumbo, where the peasants are about three times richer than Jacob Zuma, apparently.

We were all split into groups of around twenty, and each group was allocated a country that they would represent in “simulations” (kind of like debates for world peace, except much more entertaining, depending on who you sat next to and whether they fell asleep or not). I was lucky enough to be put into the Japan group with another girl from my school, and we actually came home as better friends than before, and still hang out today. Everyone in my group was so friendly and incredible. Ironically enough, in the whole conference, the majority of people were Australians, and then South Africans, not Americans. 

There are so many memories I made, which obviously can’t all be mentioned here, but I’ll try name a few. In our first mock UN debate, one of our representatives got kicked out for trying to get Japan into a permanent seat on the Security Council. We had an “Olympics” evening, where our group lost miserably, but we had a hilarious time (but come on, throw three hundred nerds together and ask them to do an obstacle course? Of course we were going to fail desperately at the sporty stuff…). We debated in the United Nations building in New York, saw the White House and Times Square, and went to some of the greatest art museums in the world, as well as the Holocaust memorial. The cruise on the final night made me cry more than I did during the Visa Catastrophe. And I cried even harder on the plane flight home. Sitting typing this now, I can’t actually imagine a part of the conference I disliked. Sure, there were embarrassing moments (we had to do a “presentation”/skit on what we learned about our country and I won’t go into details but basically Japan was the laughing stock of the evening and perhaps the whole conference), but overall it was the best experience of my lifetime.

When I spoke to the three girls at my school that attended GYLC last year, I did not understand what they meant when they said they’d give anything to go back. I do now. I think I would seriously contemplate chopping off one of my fingers to be able to reunite with the friends I made there, because the concept of never being able to see them again makes me want to throw up. I even got Facebook just to keep in touch with them, and those of you who know me personally will be aware of what a big step that is for me – I see getting a Facebook account as the first step in giving in to society’s expectations. I have no words to fully describe what a phenomenal experience it was, and I urge any and all teenagers reading this to apply online to go sometime in the future. GYLC is a memory that I will cherish for the rest of my life.

Thank you Japow-pow for giving me memories that will last
forever xx

Envision's website.

GYLC information.

Ask your teacher/mentor to nominate you here.

Update: It's been two years since I went on GYLC, and with the benefit of hindsight, I wouldn't really describe it as positively as I did here. Because this is one of the only GYLC-experience blogs out there, I get a lot of people contacting me because they're unsure of whether it will be "right" for them. If you're one of those people, I'd love to try answer your questions. I remember how conflicted I felt about the conference, and even then I had some people from my school to confront about their own experiences. 

The main point out of all of my advice, though, is that it's not a "conference" as such, so don't expect it to be one. It's weird. There's no proper way to explain it. There are conference elements, like the debating and learning how to interact within a multi-lateral organisation, but there are also fun activities like sight-seeing, talent shows, group bonding exercises and the like. The most "beneficial" part of the conference was the social aspect. If I had to tell you why you should go (which I don't want to, because so many people experience it differently), I would say that it's the people that make it worthwhile. Go make friends. Broaden your horizons and your understanding of the world. Interact with new, interesting people.

I hope this helps. Good luck, guys.