This picture was taken on 12 June 2008. It is a picture of Eriye and I watching a judge at the Courthouse in Akwanga, Nasarawa State, Nigeria signing our marriage certificate. It was a happy day for both of us, as we anticipated sharing our lives during the remainder of my placement in Akwanga and then travelling together to Canada for a totally new experience for Eriye.Shortly after our wedding, we submitted our application for a Permanent Resident Visa for Eriye. For more than a year we heard nothing from CIC (Citizenship and Immigration Canada) but continued to hope that something would happen soon so we could come to Canada together at the end of my volunteer placement. Unfortunately, my job ended before we were able to get Eriye's visa, or even to find out where we were in the process of getting said visa.
I had to come home because the College of Education Akwanga had not requested that I stay any longer to continue working with them. It was a sad day on 2nd September when I left Eriye with another volunteer living in Abuja and made my way to the airport to make my way home alone. We did not know what was in store, but continued to have a naive hope that we would be reunited within a short period of time. My plan was to begin working through whatever contacts I could find that might help to move the decision process forward.
Sometime in November, after a few letters and appeals to the Canadian High Commission in Accra, Ghana, we were told that Eriye would have her immigration interview on 9th December 2009. It was hard to keep from getting too excited, as we had no reason to think that Eriye's application would be rejected. We started hoping for a reunion before Christmas.
Eriye travelled to Accra for the interview. It is a two day trip from where she is staying with friends in Port Harcourt, Nigeria - and that is two days of hard travel. We were happy to have another volunteer from Akwanga join her in Accra, and they enjoyed some time together while Eriye prepared herself for the interview. On the designated day, Eriye made her way to the High Commission and faced her interviewer. I say faced, because Eriye came away from the interview feeling very attacked. The interviewer said that our marriage certificate looked fake, like something that I had made myself on the computer and then sent to Eriye for the interview. Eriye did not go with a photo album of our wedding (mostly because we did not have one) or of events that we had participated in together since our wedding. We had no idea that these things would be needed. We know that our marriage is real, and had no reason to think that the Canadian government would not accept the documentation that we provided.
We were both so disappointed with the decision of the interviewer, and with the entire immigration process. Rather than helping us to know what is needed to ensure that our marriage is considered real, we have wasted a year finding out that we did not provide enough. During that year we could have gathered more supporting evidence if only we had known. Now we face an appeal process that might last for another year or longer, with no guarantee that the decision will be reversed.
Eriye left the interview with very bad feelings about Canada and not so sure that she wants to come here anymore. And, with winter settling in and me freezing here at home, I am not so sure that Canada is as wonderful as I have always thought it was. So who knows what is next in our lives.
After the interview, Eriye and her friend went to the market near the High Commission. While there, Eriye's bad was stolen and she lost:
* her brand new passport (about a month old and one that she went through a lot of trouble to get)
* her health card
* bank cards (her accounts, my accounts, etc.)
* money
* her bus ticket back to Port Harcourt
* all of her contact information
* everything else that a woman happens to carry in her bag on a regular basis
I have a feeling that 9th December 2009 will be a day that Eriye will remember for a long time. And all I could do is comfort her as best I could with a long distance phone call.
Eriye is back in Port Harcourt now and making some decisions about what she will do to make a living, since it appears that she might be there for a long time. She will have to look at a place to live, employment or work of some sort, and all those things that are part of having a home. And I am still in Beamsville doing what I can to survive here, while I start working on an appeal to bring Eriye home. We are both suffering from being alone, and hoping to be reunited soon. But neither of us knows what that will look like yet.
