The last few months have been spent learning and preparing for our trip to Ghana, along with my day job! Preparation tasks made a long list, including vaccinations, visas, education and planning for my absence.
For my Visa application, I contacted the local Ghanaian Consulate, which is an easy drive from where I live and work and confirmed that I could get my Visa locally rather than mailing my passport to Ottawa. I found a small office building with a Starbucks on the ground floor and very little activity going up or down the elevator. Walking down the hall, it seemed to be mostly small company office. The office of the Ghanaian Consulate was a plain room with a table and a few chairs around it, with a meter square hole in the wall, behind which sat a handsome suited gentleman talking on his cellphone. When I approached, he indicated I should sit and wait. When he finished his call I was welcomed to the counter where he went through my documents and told me to come back in 3 days. Nothing to it.
When I came back he knew which file was mine - not because he remembered me, but because I was the only file waiting to be picked up! I signed for my passport with the Visa pasted to a new page and left. As I popped into Starbucks, I took a look at this unusual thing in my passport and noticed an error in the passport number that had been handwritten on the Visa form. I went back upstairs to have this fixed and the man behind the counter simply used a pen to change the 8 to a 2. Boy life is simple in Ghana... I hope this is the same when I arrive in Ghana! Will they disqualify me from entry since the Visa seems to have been edited? I don't even want to think about it...
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