I hate bureaucracy

I have never been particularly fond of bureaucracy (who is?), but over the past few days, my distaste for it has grown.

I have spent much of this week working on a grant application. This potential funder requires a ridiculous amount of supporting documents. It requires a lot of forms that are supposedly to conform with US anti-terrorism legislation, but none of our other US-based funders require such things. I spent hours gathering our financial records for the past four years and entering them into the funder’s super-complicated form. I am a college-educated native speaker and I had trouble with it. How are organizations without such a person able to apply?

(Or maybe it’s just that I am losing my edge. First I couldn’t understand Pirates 3, now this… early senility?)

The potential funder also wants all of our founding and governing documents in English and Serbian. I was extremely happy to see that English versions already exist. I was less excited when I discovered that there are no electronic copies of the original Serbian versions. So I spent yesterday afternoon scanning them and running the ones in Latin script through a optical character recognition program. The Cyrillic texts will remain jpegs, as we don’t have the software. Not that they will look at them anyway...

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And this isn’t even my #1 reason for hating bureaucracy over the past few days. On Monday night, one of my favorite people in the world called me. He will be spending the summer in Amsterdam and we worked out details of when I will visit him there in July. Conspicuously absent from the conversation was any discussion about visas. As an American, I don’t have to think about such things – at least in this corner of the world.

When I arrived at work yesterday, everything was in an uproar. My boss was just denied a Schengen visa. (That’s a visa for all—or nearly all [I haven’t looked into the details and am not inclined to do so right now.] of Western Europe.) She has received one for the past seven years. Her application included a guarantee letter from a German foundation and a letter of invitation from a member of the European Parliament. She’s a middle-aged lady with a job she is passionate about and a husband who will remain here—not an overstay risk in any way that I can imagine.

Just because of the locations of our births, I can traipse across this continent—which isn’t even my home—to visit friends, while she has to stand in lines, prepare all sorts of supporting documents, and cross her fingers that the powers that be will let her accompany women who lost their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons in Srebrenica on a speaking tour. That was what she was planning to do next week.

Again (can it ever be said enough times?), I hate bureaucracy.