Albanian Trip to the Temple

We in the United States of America are so spoiled as far as being able to travel to the Temple with ease. Let me tell you of our experience in taking 14 Albanian Saints to the temple and what they have to go through just to make the trip.

Four months ago the mission home began the process of requesting those who would be attending the temple from each Branch. After they received the requests the process began. The first time the Albanian Saints go to take out their own endowments there is a Church Foundation that provides money for them to go. Each person needs to sacrifice by and providing all the funds they can toward the trip, about 10-20%. If they have attended the Temple before they have to provide the total amount so there are very few that can go more than once.

They do all the normal things like attending Temple Preparation classes and obtaining temple recommends. But there are other things they need to do in order to leave the country. They need to get a passport and apply for a visa to Germany. The temple needs to provide a request for each of the saints coming to the temple. Those requests from the temple along with a 4 page form filled out by each person are then submitted to the German Embassy. Then the German Embassy schedules a date with each person to come for a personal interview. Then after several weeks the German Embassy approves or denies visa’s for each individual.

This temple visit there were 37 people requested to go, out of those 24 names were sent to the temple. These 24 each filled out forms and together with the temple requests they were submitted to the German Embassy. They all went to the German Embassy for their personal interviews the 26th of August and were to find out their visa status on the 2nd of September. The German Embassy delayed this for a week, 2 September, then another week 9 September. The German Embassy was closed on the 9th of September so they did not find out until the 10th of September. We had tickets to fly on the 14 of September which gave very little time between finding out and leaving. Seven were denied visa’s which the mission home appealed but none of them were approved so those seven had to stay home. One of which was a couple from our Vlorȅ Branch who were going to be married and sealed in the temple (Redian ҫelaj and Kesian Bitaj). This was very sad to see this happen.