my friend ben

My friend Ben is a prince among men, a Jesus- and TheArtist FormerlyKnownAs-loving force of nature to the Nth degree, and he's getting his family back. The saga, in a nutshell, is that Ben, being one of the most altruistic people I know, was, several years back, in a small village in Costa Rica with his church group helping to rebuild houses after a large hurricane. During his month there he met a lovely young Costa Rican woman and fell in love. After going through the entire bureaucratic process of having her move to New York and become his wife, and after adopting her daughter and buying an apartment and creating a warm and loving home, and after doing this all completely legally and honestly, he's been through hell trying to get them back. Over a month ago the three of them traveled to Costa Rica to visit her family, and while they were there, their passports were stolen. To make a long story short, the United States seems incapable of helping families navigate the immigration system, and I imagine to most people that comes as no surprise. It's taken Ben until today to get a guarantee that his wife and daughter would be able to come home to him at all, and that was only after somehow gaining the personal attention and help of Senator Clinton's office. And even now, he has to wait for another interminable week before he can welcome their plane with open arms and tears of joy. God Bless America, and these incompetent federal bureaucracies that are supposed to be keeping us safe but can't even manage to fax a copy of someone's permanent residency card and marriage certificate to a US Embassy on foreign soil.