Embassy’s Lies Bring Helpful Lesson and Improved Itinerary

I wrote a couple of crabby posts yesterday, and in the middle of the night, I took them down. Today I start fresh.

My wife and I were cheated and lied to by a rude Italian embassy employee in Lusaka. That’s the basis of the crabby posts.

We intended to go to Italy and Greece. Africans are nearly prisoners on their continent because it’s so hard to get other countries to give them visas. The Italian embassy in Lusaka handles things for Greece, so we applied for a visa to visit both countries.

We arranged accommodations and activities, and we gathered documentation. We bought travel insurance. The only thing we didn’t do was to buy flights, because these days, flights are nonrefundable. I found some good flights and listed them on our itinerary. We had a travel agent type it all up.

Italy made us wait weeks for an appointment, and when the day came, a lady at the embassy yelled at my wife. She was very, very nice to a white family that showed up, but she talked to my wife like a dog that had been caught trying to get on the furniture.

She said we would be rejected because we hadn’t bought flights. My wife explained that we had been rejected before, so we didn’t want to risk buying tickets and then losing the fares. The rude lady told her we had probably been rejected because we hadn’t bought flights. She told us she would reject us if we didn’t buy them. She assured my wife we would be accepted if we bought tickets.

She gave us ONE DAY to fix things. That’s much harder than it sounds. I spent about 12 hours working on a new itinerary, and we ended up asking this terrible woman for mercy. She said we could come back in a few days.

During this time, we learned that a Schengen visa from Italy allowed us to go anywhere in Europe, so we decided to go to Paris, Switzerland, and Italy, in that order, with the largest time interval in Italy.

Mind you, nobody in his right mind goes to Italy in the summer. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to spend a whole week there, either. I would love to spend a long time in Switzerland, but Italy is, frankly, less appealing. We didn’t know of anyone else who would give us a visa, so we settled for a week in Italy, with shorter stays in France and Switzerland.

The rude lady told us we would get our answer in two to three weeks. As the third week drew to a close, we had heard nothing, so we both emailed her. No response. After the promised time period had passed, Rhodah got in her car and went to see the rude lady.

At the embassy, the rude lady was not woman enough to meet Rhodah face to face. She screamed from her office instead. An Italian man who spoke no English was sent out to talk to Rhodah, and a bilingual Zambian had to translate. The short version: no visa. And the rude lady denied she had ever told us we had to buy tickets.

We received a rejection form with a bunch of reasons and boxes, and one box was checked. All it said was that they didn’t find all of our information reliable.

Of course, all of our information was reliable and easily verified. I don’t think the rude lady or anyone else at the Italian embassy looked at any of it. I think they let our materials sit until Rhodah arrived, and then they checked the top box to get rid of her. I think they intended to reject us the entire time, because it’s the default response for black Africans.

A lot of Africans go to Europe and become illegal aliens. European nations make a lot of noise about being progressive, but of course, dishonesty and pretense are big parts of leftism. You know how that works. Leftists say abortion is about women’s rights, but it’s really about getting rid of black babies, so they put their clinics in minority neighborhoods. They say they love high taxes, and then they lie about their income and hide it. They cry about carbon, while flying around on private jets. They cry about guns while paying armed guards to protect them. Europeans may claim to be more advanced than Americans, but it’s pretty clear they reject African tourists as a matter of policy, absent compelling reasons.

I don’t think the embassy would ever have responded to us without a physical visit.

I managed to get some of our flight money back yesterday, along with a partial credit from United Airlines. Whether that credit will ever have any value, I can’t say. I don’t think I’ll ever travel inside the US again, and if European flights on United have inconvenient schedules or other problems, I won’t ruin trips in order to save $1100. I would rather take the flights I want than have day-long layovers or 5 a.m. arrivals, and if I lose money, so be it.

So that’s our story.

I think God gave me a revelation about this lady.

He has told me not to pay much attention to what creatures with no authority say, because they always like to say no and make threats. He has the final word, and he says yes. It’s very common for underlings and pencil-pushers to tell Christians this or that is impossible, right before the Christians get what they want.

The rude lady is a lackey, not the queen of Italy. A diplomatic employee doesn’t end up at a desk in Lusaka because she has friends in high places. She doesn’t have human connections that amount to anything, and she certainly doesn’t have God behind her. So why was she able to delay us?

The first time Rhodah talked to her, it was clear she was abusive and crazy. Nonetheless, we let her into our lives.

God influences people, but he doesn’t interfere with free will. He wasn’t going to take possession of a dishonest woman who had already made up her mind and force her to help us. We should have shaken the dust off our feet and applied somewhere else. Lesson learned. Sometimes you have to deal with rotten people, but when you don’t, you should choose to cut them off.

This is good information for people who married before they knew God. If you married a jerk, it’s on you, not God, so it’s possible all the prayers in the world won’t fix your marriage. Be careful who you associate with.

Can we still get into Europe? Probably. There are Schengen countries that are much more cooperative than the spoiled Big Four, meaning England, France, Germany, and Italy. The problem is that the easiest countries are bad destinations. Estonia. Lithuania. Places like that. Also, some of them now use Sweden and other uncooperative nations to process visas for Zambians.

I would rather go back to Turkey than spend a week in Estonia or Lithuania. We could always fly to Tallinn, spend one night there, and then go to Switzerland, but the Schengen watchdogs or whatever might find out, and after that, we might have problems with them on future trips.

Supposedly, if you have already been to a Schengen country, and you have not bombed any shopping malls or become an illegal alien, it’s easier for you to get another Schengen visa later on, but I take this rumor with a grain of salt, because we spent almost two weeks in Ireland, and Italy, which is on a lower tier economically and in other ways, still rejected us. Ireland isn’t a Schengen country, but it’s much better than Italy for illegals, so if Rhodah didn’t stay there, why would she stay in poorer, less pleasant Italy?

Ireland is doing great, by the way. They are above the US in GDP per capita. So much for “rich American tourists.” Those days are gone, buddy. The eagle’s wings have been clipped. Tourism destinations aren’t as excited about us as they once were, and they never will be again. They love the Chinese, though.

Things constantly change because of coronavirus, so the knowledge we had about travel last year is full of errors now. I just learned something helpful. This year, the Czech Republic started processing visas at their embassy in Lusaka. You don’t have to go through Italy or Sweden. You don’t have to mail your passport to South Africa.

The Czechs even say they’ll respond in 3-5 days. Usually. They are shaming the lazy Europeans who keep people in suspense for weeks without cause.

If you go to the Czech embassy’s page, you will see they prominently display a story about seeking Zambian students for scholarships. They send them to Czechoslovakia. This attitude is nothing like what we’ve seen from other Schengen countries, which seem obsessed with pretending to love Africa while denying visas summarily and attacking Africa’s Christianity by promoting homosexuality inside Africa.

We should be able to get an answer from the Czechs within a few days.

Should we go to the Czech Republic? Yes. Of course. It’s very beautiful. It has all sorts of castles and hiking opportunities. The food is good. Crime is low. And a Czech visa will get us into Switzerland. Even Italy, if we choose. We could go to Italy, take pictures of ourselves grinning by the Coliseum, and email them to the rude lady at the Italian embassy. Not saying we should do that, but it would be legal, and there wouldn’t be anything she could do.

I don’t know too much about the Czechs, but they seem less full of it than the wokified nations of godless Europe. They had a president or poobah or whatever who didn’t believe human beings caused global warming. They make very, very nice guns. They seem to get things done, like the Finns and the Swiss. They’re don’t seem to be helpless and irresponsible like some other nations I could name. Okay; Italy. And Spain. And Greece.

I don’t know if I’m right. These are just impressions.

I’m going to set up an itinerary for the Czech Republic, and we will apply next week. If things don’t go well, we can always go to Dubai and look at the sand.