Ahmed had originally planned to leave on the 5th June and visit his family in Toronto for a week on his way back to Abu Dhabi. In our last-ditch attempt to try and get some official part of the process done while he was still here, he moved his flight back to the 13th June and would be arriving in Abu Dhabi at midnight the night before stepping in the classroom at 8am. Cutting it fine.
We were still holding out some hope that DIF might be able to squeeze our appointments in before Ahmed left. We arranged another meeting with Aida.
Bad news: turns out there are three judges in the Tijuana family court, and we've got the finickity one. Our judge likes to get all the paperwork very thoroughly checked over before issuing the letter asking for DIF to conduct our interviews. And there are a few things she's not happy with. Firstly, we need a letter stating that Maya will be sponsored to be resident in Abu Dhabi. This letter needs to be on official letterhead from Ahmed's University, then legalized by our lawyer in Dubai, then legalized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Dubai, then certified a true copy by the Mexican Embassy in Lebanon, then sent to Tijuana. Secondly, our residence visas in our passports are in Arabic, and not translated. We need official translations.
I'm distraught, as last time we did this whole couriering thing, it took over three weeks. I can hardly bear to wait another day.
It's the last week of term, and a lot of the support staff at Zayed University have left, but luckily there is one person in the HR department there able to print out and courier this letter to Dubai to get that started.
I find all the Embassies in Mexico City of Arabic-speaking countries to find out if there is perhaps an official Arabic translator somewhere in Mexico.
Aida works her magic, and thankfully in the meantime, our judge will accept a faxed copy of the letter which will eventually make its way to her, and has found a translator for the visas. So now we just wait until the letter is ready to go to DIF.
More bad news: DIF definitely won't be able to interview us while Ahmed's still here. In fact, the letter's unlikely to be written in time, even. So we are now bracing ourselves for him needing to come to Mexico again. He's used all his annual leave up on this trip, so we're not sure how he'll manage it. He will be teaching for eight weeks straight with no possibility to take even a long weekend. Plus, it's literally the other side of the world, and not exactly cheap.
I'm struggling not to just spend Ahmed's last week here in constant flood of tears.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment