The processing office is located in strip mall, the small entrance belying the true arena that lay inside. As soon as you pass through the door, you're in a maze of cordoned paths. With a sea of people ahead and others behind you from countries who don't require the same amount of personal space as North Americans... I started sweating.
That's when it hit me. This was a livestock sale barn.
Actually, my first thought was that the place was designed like a slaughterhouse.
Seeing as that notion was about to send me into a full blown panic attack, I settled on sale barn. And I thought of my cow, Daphne, how distressed she looked when I bid on her at the Letohatchee livestock sale. This is where I first saw her:
To calm myself, I kept thinking WWDD, What Would Daphne Do? She didn't flip out and jump the barricades, so I needed to emulate my cow.
Being zen became even more was challenging when a Filipinos trio of diminutive men ahead of me put on a Three Stooges skit for the big bad Gate Keeper. Instead of each holding their own IDs and application forms; one held all the passports, another held the applications and the third had the US visas. The Gate Keeper wanted only one applicant at a time at his line on the floor, but the more exasperated he became from trying to ask who was who, the more he raised his voice and the tighter the little bundle of Filipinos knotted.
I felt that at any moment, they were going to get zapped by a cattle prod.
If the Gate Keeper had looked like the one in the video, I wouldn't have been so stressed:
No one offered to help, no one moved. The entire time I was there, you could hear a pin drop. Entire families were here, yet it was so quiet. No one was chit chatting, nothing. The anxiety was all too palpable.
I was sent from one queue to another until I was at my last stop where the senior agent placed a sticker on my immigrant's card and declared I'd been extended. Like any foreign country is going to believe a Jiminy Cricket sticker is actually official. I didn't understand why the Welcome mat had been snatched out from under me, but I wasn't about question it and piss off the agent, who still had my card and could peel off my sticker. He mumbled something about new changes and "nothing to worry about", it would sort itself out. Hardly comforting when this sticker cost me $560.
Take away message is that if your home and your nationality are the same, you ought to be very grateful. Because if the place you call home doesn't match your passport, someday you might be told it's a house of cards.
I got in my car in North Atlanta and never stopped until I was back on the farm. Home Free. First act: thank my Daphne for moral support.
Have you hugged your refugee today?
