Dear Universe, what did I ever do to you?

Spring semester of my junior year of college, I took what was probably the most difficult non-Arabic course of my educational career: Schechter's international law class. I reliably showed up for the 8:30 AM class early, and in the time before class began, Schechter would amuse us early risers with little stories. One of my favorites was how as an elementary school student during the Cold War, he was assured by his teachers that on the day that the Soviet Union nuked Washington DC, the wind would be blowing away from them in Virginia. And he said that he always wondered how they could be sure of that...

But that's not the anecdote I'm thinking of right now. The one that is running through my head is one he told about his father's business travels, and how it initially struck him as odd that whenever his father returned from business abroad, the country that he'd been visiting would end up all over the news - bombs and coups and assassinations. But eventually he stumbled upon the reason for all of this: obviously his father's presence caused governments to spontaneously collapse, buildings to explode, and leaders to fall from power.

I'm thinking of that anecdote, because right now that's how I'm feeling: that my association, like that of the elder Mr. Schechter, must cause things to go very, very wrong abroad.

This afternoon, I got a call from my Country Desk Officer (or CDO, i.e. the Peace Corps person in charge of me while I'm stateside), and the fact that she started the conversation by saying something akin to "I see you were supposed to go to Madagascar originally, I hate to do this to you..." should have clued me in to just how awful the rest of that conversation would be.

The Mauritanian government has not yet processed visas for my staging class. (Similar delays are also affecting other U.S. Americans trying to enter the country; no word on how or whether this will affect PCVs currently serving in Mauritania.) I will not be leaving for Philadelphia a week from today, or Africa in nine days. My CDO, Nicole, has indicated that they are continuing to work to get the visas through, and there is talk about us leaving maybe in July, maybe in August...I'm fuzzy on the details, honestly, because I could not hear Nicole over the sound of the voices in my head screaming "No no no no no no no no no!"

I feel sick. (I feel even sicker for the people in my group who were supposed to go to Madagascar in February, who have now been delayed twice.) I wrote one other post today (which remains as yet unpublished), it was about how I finally finished packing. The thought of unpacking makes me sick, but so does the thought of looking at my full duffel and backpack sitting in the corner of my room every day for the next who-knows-how-many weeks.

And who does know? How long will it take to know for sure if we can or can't go? And if the answer is that we can't, how long will we wait to go somewhere else?

...what now?