Snarls of Bureaucracy

My little Buddhist group currently has only the occasional visit from our teacher in Charleston (about 100 miles away) and he's not well, so we're trying to bring over another monk from the Drepung Loseling monastery in Southern India. Unfortunately my administrative skills and free time landed me the pleasure of arranging the visa. I've been working with a wonderful lawyer at Catholic Charities, and everyone's been very good, but there is so much minutiae involved, getting copies of this and that, and pushing people to send it now, this very minute, even to the point of going to their offices to get it during their lunch, etc., to say nothing of having little chats with the staff at Senator Lindsey Graham's office (glad they didn't check to see what other emails I'd sent him--fortunately all polite). Many early morning phone calls and faxes that invariably waked Bill into a very grumpy mood. All this was under some pressure since we needed to send the materials to the monk for his appointment at the Embassy in New Delhi on Feb. 27, so we also spent a good bit of money sending stuff via DHL.

Only today we find out the appointment is actually March 27.

Good opportunity to learn patience, I suppose. Also better than finding out it had really been Jan. 27. But still. Ugh.

Fortunately Bill just left for Prague, so he can miss the next round of 8 AM calls and faxes correcting the previous ones. He did not see that as a good opportunity to learn to love early mornings (he has a cross-stitch from a friend that says: "If God had wanted us to see the sun rise, he wouldn't have made it happen so early").