So you start clothes shopping, immunizations, going through the To-Do list, and one day you get a package from the Church's travel office about a little thing you may have overlooked... your visa requirements.
Piece of cake right? Maybe you already have a passport, maybe you had a friend or relative go to Chile or Argentina and it was easy-peasy! You have four months to get it done, so it's not gonna be that bad right?
PSYCHE.
The next few weeks will be the most grueling, stressful, stroke-inducing process you will ever go through. Trust me.
Let me go ahead and share with you my experience in the hopes that it will help any other prospective missionaries who've received their call, to avoid the same mistakes I made, and to brace yourselves for the road bumps that are ahead of you.
When I first got my paperwork with the requirements for my visa, I was actually not in the same state. I was living in Utah, preparing to move back to my hometown in Georgia where my mother lived. So by the time I actually got back to Georgia where my paperwork was, it had been about 2 weeks after my requirements had been sitting on the kitchen table.
Mistake #1. Do NOT wait 2 weeks to start on your visa. Guaranteed it will take that long to get all the necessary paperwork together that you'll need. In fact, start gathering things for your passport (if you don't have one already), your seminary transcripts etc. as SOON as your call is opened.
We finally opened and looked at the requirements 5 days before they were due back in Salt Lake at the Church's travel office. We weren't in panic mode yet until we read the entire page (double-sided) and every single hoop we had to jump through for this to all be legitimate. Or at least legitimate enough for the Brazilian government.
They WILL ask you for:
an original birth certificate (which you won't get back), 2 copies of your seminary transcripts, a police clearance letter (which 80% of police stations have no idea what that is, so if they give you a hard time just ask for a background check/history), 2 copies of your seminary graduation diplomas, every single copy of the inside of your passport (no I'm not kidding), 2 copies of a CV (curriculum vitae, that you'll have to create which proves that you attended church through out your life starting from primary till Relief Society or Priesthood in addition to any schooling you've received etc.), a copy of your driver's license, an A Briggs Letter (which they'll send you & you'll sign), and an Indian Letter (which they'll send you & you'll sign).
Now if that wasn't a tall order in & of itself, here's where it gets complicated. I was 23 by the time I got my mission call, meaning that it had been several years since I'd graduated from seminary. I had NO idea what the heck I'd done with my graduation diploma & I didn't remember EVER getting a "seminary transcript" so like any other normal person, I went to the Church's CES and the Seminary & Institute websites [seminary.lds.org or si.lds.org]. which proved to be the most useless website ever in existence, as there wasn't a single link to requesting your seminary transcripts or anything like unto it. (I'm not a huge fan of Church websites, lds.org & all of their sister sites are the most UNuser-friendly sites on the planet)
I finally found one copy of my seminary graduation diploma but as the paperwork stated, I needed two. Both my sister and I googled seminary transcripts/diplomas and nothing came up. Not on the seminary website or lds.org. Luckily my sister AND my mother had contacts in the church's seminary program, and after several frantic phone calls & emails we finally got a hold of someone who sent us an email with an attached PDF copy of my seminary graduation diploma and a copy of my seminary transcripts that I just ended up making 2 prints of.
(To request a copy of your seminary transcripts and/or graduation diploma contact the Information Services for Seminaries & Institutes at 801-240-0540 & tell them you need a copy of your transcript or graduation certificate)
If your diplomas look different, as mine did, you need to make sure they look IDENTICAL. I thought I was okay, since both mine were different, but as it turns out they do need to match. Make sure that the person you get a hold of at the Seminaries & Institute Office gets you two copies of the same Seminary Diploma.
Start on your passport ASAP if you don't have one already. In fact, I'd say if you're putting your papers in now, to start on it now, just in case. It's always good to have a passport handy just in case, even if you're not planning on leaving the country, it is good to have an additional form of ID. And in case you need to leave the country in a hurry.
Now, moving onto your next misadventure. Your clearance letter is probably gonna be the most tricky to get (at least for me it was). Since I live in one of the bottom 5 most intelligent states in the country, I had to explain to 3 different police stations and several members of Georgia's Finest, what exactly a police clearance letter is. Basically, if you remember the report cards you'd get in elementary and middle school that told your parents how good/bad your behavior was? This is a grown up version of that. It's basically telling Brazil that you don't have any criminal history and that you have "good behavior" or "good conduct."
Now I'm sure in other states, you may not have a problem with your police departments in explaining this document to them, but I sure as heckfire had a hard time in my state. I went to 3 different counties and this didn't ring a bell to ANY of them. Me & my sister called the Church's Travel Office (which I'm sure you'll be doing a lot of, so go ahead and add their number into your phone right now) and told them that none of these people knew what this was. They finally told us a background check will do, but that it was easier to ask for a clearance letter than a background check. Cause you know, businesses and colleges and major corporations always ask for clearance letters. They never ask for background checks! -_-
Anyway, we finally ended up just asking for a background check which ended up looking and being a clearance letter. Apparently, "clearance letter" is just a fancy phrase for background check. Just make sure it's official, on a piece of paper with the police letterhead at the top. Now, this was the second time around doing this. The first time I asked for one at the Atlanta Police Department, a sweet lil old lady said they could do it but because of the notary situation (which is a fun thing I'll talk about in the next blog entry!) we had to do it another day. The next day when I came in with a notary, there was one dude workin the desk and all of his supervisors were out in training. I asked for a clearance letter, he said they don't do those. So I relented and asked for the background check. He ended up just giving me the background check REQUEST and not the background check. Not only was it the wrong document, but the notary didn't witness him sign it. A lot of these documents have to be notarized (which I'll get to later) and the problem was the notary had to watch the kid sign the background check document for him to notarize it. The secretary guy refused saying "We work with the Brazilian gov't, it doesn't need to be notarized, it's fine blah blah blah, I'm a dirty skank." Okay, he didn't say that, but that's what I was hearing. So we hired a notary to waste 30 minutes of his time, and paid 30$ in total for a useless piece of paper.
Mistake #2. Not getting a person's name in authority. Make sure you take people's names down when you talk to them BEFORE you break out the wallet. I wish I knew the name of the lady who told me they could do notarized police clearance letters from the day before so I could've put the fear of God in this kid to do it right. You sound like you know what you're talking about if you can say, "Well I talked to Anita So-in-so yesterday and she said you guys did clearance letters and that they can be notarized here. I'd like to talk to her." Also, bring the physical paper that has the description of what the clearance letter is so that you can read verbatim what the Church has outlined. If this STILL doesn't sound familiar, google police clearance letter and print out a copy for them to actually see. If this still doesn't work, ask to speak to a supervisor & keep pestering them until you get someone who knows what they're talking about.
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