The waiting begins

I returned home to Maryland and was very hyped up!  I actually did it!  I was offered the job of my dreams. I was told to be prepared to leave the country any time after December 26th. That was just over 3 weeks away! Now, all I will have to do is wait. Well, that is not exactly true. I now have a TON of paperwork to complete.

 First: I am still waiting for my passport to arrive. I chose to pay for expedited service since I wanted to make sure I had my passport in time. However, at this moment, it has yet to arrive. When it does come in I must make at least 8 color copies to be used in the UAE for government

Second: The biggest task is to have all my documents authenticated. When I was told I needed to have this done I had a hard time understanding just what this entailed. As it turns out, my college diploma, state teaching certificate, and marriage license must be certified official by the State department and the U.A.E embassy. The steps to getting this done is pretty complicated. The first step is taking my original documents and full color/size copies of my originals to a local notary public. The Notary will notorize my color copies of my documents. After this is completed, I send the notorized documents to the county court house. (note: You must use the same county court house as the location of the Notary). The county courthouse will certify that the notary's notarization is authentic. When they are returned to me, I am to send my documents to the Office of the Secretary of State, in Annapolis for certification. When these are returned to me, I am to forward the certified coduments on to ProEx. ProEx is a company that helps to wade through all the paperwork and completes the process. In essence, ProEx processes and sends on my documents to their final destinations: The U.S. State department, and the U.A.E. Embassy. My documents will be stamped, signed and affixed with an acutal UAE stamp. This finalizes the authentication of my documents and my documents can be used to complete the VISA process. As you can see this process take alot of time, and handling by many people. One suggestion, make color copies of all returned documents! It would be a huge mess if your documents were to become lost in the shuffle.

Fortunately, this process worked through smoothly for my documents. Although, I must admit I was pretty nervous that things would be lost and I would have to do the whole process all over again!

Since this process has been completed, I am just waiting for the UAE people to complete my VISA process and contact me with travel details!  I hope they contact me soon for I am raring to go!