“The Visa Girls Want You”

“The visa girls want you,” my coworker said, stopping by my office door, giggling as she told me. I rolled my eyes and braced myself for a long academic advising session with them. Six women from Russia came to the college one summer, as they had learned that we had a phlebotomy certification program. The phlebotomy certificate is only ten weeks long in the summer term. The six ladies were all middle aged and they had extremely thick Russian accents. In Russia, they had been highly educated individuals supposedly, but they came to the states and their education didn’t equate to much so they decided to start from the ground up. They could hardly understand a word I said though. Let’s just say, they really helped me break down my English to the bare minimum. Every time I spoke, they used their phones to translate my English into Russian.

They came in multiple times each week. They came in so often that they would always ask for me specifically, even though there were other people that tried to help them in the office. Academic advising can be a little complex sometimes for people that are born in the states. Academic advising, or any communication for that matter, with Russian middle aged women is even more challenging. The Russian “visa girls” really tested me in some interesting ways. At one point, I even translated the college website with Google translate into Russian. Honestly, that was the first time I’ve ever seen our website in the Russian language before. The college that I work at has very few international students.

Anyways, they had made it through their class and lab portion of the their curriculum and they had started their clinical portion of their phlebotomy program. I was concerned that they would have trouble getting jobs because their English was still so rocky. They had completed some ESOL courses but it still seemed very difficult for them to understand me. They had a long way to go in order to comprehend basic English readily. They even joked about wanting me to learn Russian. I thought to myself, sure, I could learn Russian in my free time and then laughed at the thought.

One day, they came in asking for me… Again… surprise. They all came in together. All six of them sat in my office. They did everything as a pack, which was intriguing to me in and of itself. There was usually one that was especially friendly and she always wanted a hug. I didn’t want to seem like a jerk, so I just gave her a hug whenever she initiated it. The reason that they came in this particular day was to ask if I would volunteer for them to draw my blood in their clinical. I had never done that before, especially for students on campus. It felt like it was a little bit strange, so I emailed the instructor of the clinical and asked if that was okay. The instructor emailed back, and said that it was fine, if I was comfortable with it. She sent me a consent form to complete. I thought to myself, well, for the sake of education, and their learning purposes, I might as well let them practice on me.

I went up to the classroom, but oddly the instructor and most of the students weren’t even there. All I saw were the six “visa girls” as they had been so affectionately been nicknamed by my coworkers in the office that I worked in. Not thinking too much of it, I sat down in the chair that appeared to be the chair to have my blood drawn. One of them asked me if I had eaten something recently. I said yes and then she began to sanitize my arm and started to draw my blood. I didn’t look down at my arm and for half a second, I closed my eyes, taking a deep breath. Right as I opened my eyes, the six Russians sank their vampire fangs into my neck. I fell over, onto the floor. The shock was so sudden I couldn’t even make a sound, much less yell for help.

The next thing I knew, I woke up, strapped to a tiny airplane chair, with my hands and feet tied and a piece of duct tape around my mouth. There wasn’t anyone sitting on either side of me in the plane. The plane was in the midst of experiencing high turbulence. My neck felt extremely sore as I turned my head. My ears rang and I passed out again.