After several visits and phone calls to the Ministry of Interior (MUP), I finally have a visa! I am no longer illegal. Since returning from Budapest my papers have technically not been in order-- not that the police are conducting random identification inspections, but it would have been a problem when I try to leave the country again next month (Rome, here I come!).

Around noon our secretary called me and said that I needed to come downstairs and meet the driver immediately so that he could take me to the MUP. I had been to the MUP only one time before, last summer. Incidentally, my papers were not in order then either until two weeks before I left the country. I suppose being an Amerikanka has its priviledges, we were able to bypass the long line and go into a special office. The office was small and there was a uniformed police officer and a young woman in jeans. The radio was blasting "folk" music and there were papers everywhere. I was wondering how she could possibly find anything-- no file cabinets, no computer, just stacks of paper. She looked at my passport and reached behind her desk to a box and pulled out a large stack of files-- but not in folders. Each file was made up of a legal-sized piece of paper folded in half with the documents stuffed inside. A few files in (not alphbetical) was a piece of paper with my name on it and inside all of the papers that we submitted in July. After a moment, she looked for an empty page in my passport (of which there are many, thanks to my trip to the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade for that specific purpose), reached into a drawer and rummaged around for a stamp and filled in some information and voila, I had my visa. Which to me is illegible and it is not obvious what country the visa is from, but ok. I have proof of my stay in Montenegro.

I am much better off than the IDPs in Montenegro who are still struggling to rebuild their lives as refugees ten years after the end of ethnic conflict in the region. Because Montenengro was relatively uninvolved in the war, it became a haven after the war for many Croatian and Bosnian Serbs. I recently met with two IDPs living in Podgorica. Both are my age but our lives could not be more different. One of the women, N was born in Bosnia to Montenegrin parents. She holds a passport from Serbia & Montenegro and BiH. The other girl, M is a Croatian Serb. Until 1994 in Croatia. When her home was burned, her family fled to Montenegro. While she is is "legal" and able to work, she cannot pursue her dream of becoming a school teacher because she is not a Montenegrin citizen. She has also never left Montenegro because she has a Croatian passport. This makes travel to any country besides BiH, Croatia, Albania, and Macedonia impossible because of visa restrictions. If she wanted to enter Europe, Canada, or the United States, she would have to go to Zagreb for the visa process (which takes at least 2 days even when all papers are in order).

I have often thought that citizens of the Balkan countries are prisoners in their own land. To enter Europe even as tourists, they must have visas. And for Montenegrins, it is even more complicated because there are no embassies in Montenegro, only a few consulates who do not deal with visa issues. So they are obliged to travel to Belgrade to obtain, which never takes one day. This means that in addition to the cost of the visa itself, there is the trip to Belgrade to get the visa... Sometimes they are lucky enough to obtain a multi-entry visa that spans as long as three years. A colleague of mine obtained this type of visa (without asking for it-- she was going on a business trip to the U.S.). She said that if something bad happens here and she needs to get out of the country quickly, at least she will have somewhere to go (I will write about the referendum some other time!).

All of this makes me realize how lucky I am that when I want to travel somewhere, I can.