Summer has officially ended and autumn is here. The new semester has started and I am still in the states.

Yes, you read that right. My students are having class and I still don’t have my visa or flight back to the kingdom.

My husband tried staying here as long as he could but sadly his time is up and his flight home is tomorrow morning. We are so surprised that we won’t be able to go home together, considering I started the visa application process in the spring. I even started it before I returned to the states, back in May. But having a Saudi agent, an American agent and my main Canadian agent didn’t guarantee a quick visa process like one would imagine. It actually possibly delayed everything since good communication skills weren’t employed. For example, my Canadian agent was told my the Saudi agent to tell me to mail all my documents to an American agent in Washington, DC so that he could take them to the embassy there. The only problem is that my documents never should have went to the DC embassy. They needed to go to the New York Embassy. Another issue is that my Canadian agent is telling me that I have to wait for documents to come from Saudi, but the Saudi agent saying that all the documents have been not only sent but received.

It is a stressful situation, especially considering that I haven’t gotten a paycheck since the first week of June. My husband keeps telling me to just be patient and that it will all arrive soon, but it’s really difficult to stay patient when things are taking too long and are so unorganized. Had it been my first time into the kingdom all these documents wouldn’t be required, but since I lived there before I needed to submit additional documentation. It’s a stressful situation because I feel like I should be doing more to speed up the process, but I am completely powerless. I guess all I can do now is just wait, and try to be patient.

Salaam,

KC