Sediq and Selena: from displaced to home
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- May 16, 2021
- 1847
My daughter stood on the steps of our small house and told me she’d need to try and get a translation of her fiancé’s birth certificate from Afghanistan approved at an embassy in Pakistan. I looked at her, her fingers poised to call every phone number possible to make this transaction happen so she could comply with the embassy request and realized then that immigrating to the United States the “right way” is nearly futile.
The love on her face signaled unending determination as she held a fat volume of papers she had prepared and emailed to him in the Eleonas refugee camp he’d lived in for four years to print and ready for his interview at the U.S. Greek embassy. They’d met there, her a volunteer and him a displaced person that had fled Kabul. His father had been a police officer that had worked against the Taliban, and because of this, there was a price on their family, a price that keeps his family home-bound on most days. His trek to the shores of Greece, leaving everything he knew, was one story in millions. But she is nothing if not tenacious, and my knees buckled at their path forward and the labyrinthine steps in the dark that lay ahead.
I know that kind of love. I know this road and the vast warrens of warehouses nestled on a street off another street that “you need to go to and obtain this paper or that one” because 32 years ago she was me.
My fiancé, my husband of now 31 years, a Mexican National who had been in the USA for 10 years before I met him, and I went to Mexico to begin the strangled process of obtaining his paperwork. We went to begin the arduous process of him coming here the “right way,” a gossamer piece of paper seemingly needed to confirm his humanity. His K1 Fiancé Visa, like my daughter’s fiancé, had been approved. But like everything else inside our American immigration system, words written on paper or spoken from behind 100 bureaucratic desks mean nothing until that Visa is stamped securely on a page in a passport. And they’ll do everything they can to make sure that process is the hardest thing you’ll ever do.
The process my daughter has gone through has been 1,000 times more difficult than mine. It’s become a maze filled with trip wires that reject you if not done correctly and is meant to confuse and mire. It is a system we may never see untangled in our lifetimes because of politicization and the polarizing effects of a thousand tongues. I wouldn’t have ever wished this process on them because it is devastating in scope. But I would always wish upon them the love this excruciating process affords.
Yesterday I woke up inside the inky blackness of my bedroom and rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. My phone told me it was 5:30 a.m., and a little notification showed I had a text from my daughter. Knowing Greece is seven hours ahead of us, it could only mean she’d had an email from the embassy. The pain of waiting had been wearing on her. They’d been apart for almost one year. I flicked open my phone and read, “Mom, Sediq has been accepted! They approved his Visa! He’s coming!” And I jumped out of bed and ran to her darkened bedroom to celebrate. Tears welled up in my eyes, hers jubilant.
The immigration system worked this time. More often than not, it fails the very ones who need it most. These are our stories to tell. When I asked her what she was feeling, her words struck me to my core. “I can’t believe he’s coming,” she said, “but more than that, he will no longer be a refugee. He can leave that word behind.” Because what is love but a kind of creature waiting to be unbound? We pick up the painful pieces of its beginning and make them a home.