Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Today I wake up and I am surprised to have gotten a good night sleep and even more surprised that I feel numb. I should be nervous that today may be the day my fait is decided but I am not. Dad and I get ready and head downstairs where the hotel van takes some many of us to the U.S. consulate for our appointments filled with judgment and resent. Appointments answered by people who have no actual say in you future. They take your paperwork and pass it on to the people who do and those cowards never see your face, because if they did, they might have to look at the face of an actual person, a wife, a mother, a sister. In the van we recognize a young man who like me had been taken to the U.S. a child, his wife, now studying to be a doctor is applying for him only for him his appointments were more difficult because at a young and naive age he decided on getting some harmless tattoos. They interrogated him relentlessly and took pictures of all his tattoos, I imagine it is to check criminal records but it’s still shameful. He tells us his second appointment to submit a pardon packet is tomorrow and he is going to go pick up his packet from some delivery place. This process has introduced us to so many people with sad and hopeful stories. All of us in one place for the same purpose and its hard to imagine that not all of us will be returning to the lives we knew. The young man tells in his broken Spanish how he is staying with strangers in a rented room and how much violence there is in his town. He stays indoors for fear of kidnappings since he doesn’t speak Spanish very well and when he speaks it is obvious he is a foreigner. We tell him I am on my way to submit my packet, we wish each other luck and I arrive back at the consulate.
Again, I want to feel nervous, nauseous, fear, something, but I do not feel a thing. There is an overwhelming sense of calmness and acceptance. My husband and my brother-in-law have spent countless days and nights putting together my pardon packet; filling it with evidence of how much I am needed home and I recognize that I am helpless. There is nothing more I can say or do to change the course of my destiny. In a few hours and days it will be up to some pencil pusher who has never met me to decide where I should call home and with whom. I am back in the same lines with the same list of numbers being assigned to us only today there are no holocaust reminders because I know none of us are being led into incinerators. It only feels that way. I sit and I wait my turn like the hundreds of people in the waiting room. We sit, wait and stare at the mindless television for our numbers to blink on the screen. I watch people go to windows where they return with tears, joy, sorrow and blank looks. The same scenarios repeat themselves and I want to feel something like all those people are feeling but nothing comes to me.
After sitting in the waiting room for four hours my number appears on the screen, number 7785 is being called to window 72. As I walk the next few steps towards my fait I wonder if any of the pages in my packet will make a difference. I arrive to find a woman annoyed that my packet looks the way it does. It is 2 or 3 inches thick, whole punched at the top, fastened together by metal prongs and sectioned of by dividers. It is professional looking but to her it’s a nuisance. She takes it apart, rearranges it and tells me to sit and wait for number to be called again so I can pay my pardon fee. We stare at each other for a few seconds and she calls out through the window “you can go now”. I can go now? Are you serious? I have waited 23 years of my life for this moment, I have slaved over countless hours of home work to obtain a bachelors and masters degree, I have volunteered on every political campaign imaginable in my area, I have given my time to non-profit organizations and have cried many nights for the things I could not do for my family and this is it, I can go now? Now I am furious, that some one like her could decide my fate. I look at her face for answers but there are none. There is no interview there are no questions, my fate will be decided on paper. The only question I can bring myself to ask her is how long I should wait for a response and she replies “three weeks or less”. A stand there just a little longer in case she decides she made a mistake and wants to call me back for some questions but I see nothing in her face and she repeats that I can sit and wait for my number again. As instructed I sit and wait only this time there are fewer people in the waiting room and I hear people talking to one another now. They are sharing their stories with each other and I am curious to know them as well.
I meet a 24 year old woman with a 3 year old child in San Diego dying of kidney failure. She was told to wait and see if an agent could review her case so she could get an answer that day, she waited 7 hours to be told to try again tomorrow. Another young woman is in tears, she has been in the immigration system for almost 9 years now and was recently notified that she had been approved 15 months ago but because she never got the letter notifying her they had voided her visa and she had to start the process all over again. The consulate conducted an investigation as to why she wasn’t getting her mail and it turns out her mother-in-law had received and signed for the mail only to deny to her and to her own son that anything had come. The woman was sad and angry that her own family member had prevented her from being with her husband all this time. They told her she would have to start the process all over again since it’s their policy to close any cases older than a year with out a response. Another two hours to pass before my number is called a second time. I wait in line where my pardon packet fee will be collected and watch in front of me how a woman pays over $5,000 dollars in pardon fees for her and her 10 or so children. I stand there thinking how that much money doesn’t guarantee her a visa and neither does my $585. I pay my fee and head back to the outside where dad is waiting for me; he’s there with another young woman we met in the cab yesterday. We sit and she tells me she too had been approved many months ago and never got a packet in the mail. The consulate blamed the packaging service and the delivery service blamed the consulate none of helped her since she was pregnant and had to deliver her baby in Mexico after being stuck there for almost 7 months now. They told her she could come back on Friday to pick up her new visa, it didn’t matter now though, her daughter had been born in the Mexico making her a Mexican citizen and if she wanted to take her to live in the U.S. with her husband she would have to wait until her daughter was approved and she didn’t know how long that was going to take now. I try to comfort her by telling her she doesn’t want to go back to North Carolina anyways since I heard on the news that they were under a tornado warning. But she says she’d rather be home in a tornado watch then be somewhere that’s not home to her. I know how she feels and I feel stupid for even saying such thing. Everyone here shares one thing in common; they are all suffering from leaving family, friends and the life they knew behind, perhaps never to return to it again.
