BECA Travels: June 2, 2012 – On KLM between SFO and Amsterdam

June 2, 2012 – On KLM between SFO and Amsterdam

We are on the plane – a group of 12 from the BECA Department!  To you, that may seem uneventful, but getting ON the plane has been quite a journey!  We are headed for Ghana, a country one needs a visa to enter.  Sometime in April, we filled out all the paperwork, collected money orders, and sent off 12 passports to the Ghanaian Embassy in Washington, D.C..  On May 14^th, I received a phone call from the Embassy, saying that due to a change (we had older visa applications), the Embassy required $10 more from each of us, and a stamped, self-addressed envelope.  That same day, one of the students collected ten more dollars (note: I cannot touch student money), and we sent off the money orders and the envelope to the Embassy on May 15^th.

By Tuesday morning, May 28^th, the passports and visas still had not arrived.  I made a number of calls to a number of extensions at the Embassy, but I couldn’t reach a person at any of them.  I did leave a message on each call.  Finally, on Thursday morning, May 31^st (two days before departure), I called Congresswoman Jackie Speier’s office for assistance.  The person in the San Mateo office felt there was nothing much she or the congresswoman could do.  I called our Frosch travel agent, and she referred me to Frosch’s Washington office.  I spoke with a person there who said she would keep callind on our behalf, and offered to be at the door to the Embassy when they opened on Friday at 8:30 AM.  But I needed to send her scans of the 12 passports (fortunately, I keep copies) and of the yellow fever vaccination card for each of us. These I had to get by fax or scan across the day.  It was close to 11:00 PM in San Francisco when I sent the yellow fever cards. 

Meanwhile, I remembered that a close friend of mine is a good friend of Congresswoman Jackie Speier.  I called friend Joan, who in turn emailed the congresswoman.  Before long, I answered my phone to find the congresswoman herself on the other end of the line!  Once she understood the situation, she put her Head of Staff on our case.  Apparently, Jackie Speier called the Ghanaian ambassador on our behalf on Thursday evening.

And the folks from HardtHaven were informed.  I talked with Sonjelle Shilton, on Thursday, and she in turned called the head of HardtHaven in Ghana, Edem, who tried calling the Embassy without success, and who also called me – three times across a 24-hour period – from Ghana.

On Friday morning, I awoke to a series of phone calls, both from Kit Hoagland of Frosch, who indeed was in front of the Embassy at 8:30 AM, but who found no one answering the door and no one answering the phone, and from Jackie Speier’s Washington office, who had talked with someone in the Embassy, to learn that our passports and visas had been sent to me by priority mail on Tuesday, the 27^th. Kit, sitting outside the Embassy in her car, called again to say she had finally roused someone in the Embassy by phone.  She also had been told that our passports and visas had been sent on Tuesday.

The group of travelers met  at the BECA Cage at 11:00 AM on Friday to pick up our equipment and do an equipment check.  Meanwhile, my older son stayed at home to take phone calls and wait for the mail.  We checked out the equipment, took with us as many of the supplies sent by a donor to HardtHaven as we thought we could carry, and left to go through our stressful, day–before-departure activities. (See the first photo.) I called my son before leaving campus, only to learn that the passports had not arrived. So I drove directly to the San Mateo post office, in hopes of finding that the passports were there.  I spoke with a postal worker and after hearing my lengthy explanation, he left his post and went back into the post office, presumably to look for any mail that might have been missed.  There was none.  He took my name and phone number and agreed to call me at 4:30 PM to let me know if there was anything in my mail carrier’s truck that resembled what we were waiting for.

I went home and called our travel agent to update her and ask if she had any suggestions for a Plan B.  She asked me to give her a few minutes to make some phone calls.  I did, willingly, and went about my packing activities. A bit later, our agent, Anne Dymond, called to report that she had worked out a transfer to a flight on Monday, contingent on not receiving the passports on Friday morning – and AT NO CHARGE!  I was stunned!  Anne cautioned me about when she would need to know whether or not we were traveling, and gave me back up phone numbers, etc..  By that time, it was close to 4:30 PM and I drove back to the post office, rather than wait for a call, to see if the postal worker had learned anything. No passports.  So I went home to alert the 11 students that it was possible we wouldn’t fly on Saturday, and to begin thinking about where they were going to stay for two nights until the new, Monday departure date.  And then I went on with my own packing!

I awoke at 8:00 this morning to await the promised 8:30 AM phone call from Gerry, the postal worker.  He called and said he had gone through all the mail for the carrier’s route, and had found 4 pieces of mail for my household – but no passports.  He said it didn’t look good, but that there was a tiny chance that the package could be with the few things that would be sorted in the next ten minutes.  He promised to call me back to let me know. It was a long ten minutes.  Shortly, Gerry called back and, when I answered the phone, said, “Good news.”  He asked me to pick up the package at 9:15 AM, shortly after the post office opened for Saturday hours.

So . . . we gathered at the KLM desk between 11:00 and 11:30 AM  and, with a few more minor glitches, we got on the plane.  You can’t imagine a happier group of folks than the ones in the attached photo at the airport.