Wet Ground, Losing Ground

As the Novem­ber rains have started, so also has a shower of gloom come upon us. With­out going into a lot of detail, it seems that our fail­ure to get Landed Immi­grant Sta­tus has had a domino effect on our sit­u­a­tion; These days, new work­ers in Canada usu­ally have Per­ma­nent Res­i­dency (Landed Immi­grant sta­tus) by the time their first year’s Work Per­mit is up for renewal. That obvi­ously wasn’t the case for us.

Because our prob­lems with Pam’s fin­ger­prints, I’m now hav­ing to do the unusual step of try­ing to get a renewal of a work per­mit. We thought this would be a sim­ple rub­ber stamp on a form at the bor­der or some other office, but at this point, it does not look either sim­ple, or even likely, in that it involves lots of more paper­work, and some other details involv­ing my employer that I’ll leave out for the moment.

At this point, there’s a strong prob­a­bil­ity that a month from today we’ll both be out of the work­force, back where we began again. Pam is even in the midst of a con­tract, and will be forced out of it, and this pains her a great deal. While a brand new Work Per­mit (for Pam, this time) will solve most of our prob­lems for the time being, that will also require pro­cess­ing (about 55 days, our Lawyer reports, and we haven’t even sub­mit­ted that yet), so there will be an inevitable gap before we can work again. In addi­tion to wait­ing for this new work per­mit, we are also wait­ing for the fin­ger­prints (still barely read­able) that we sent to Cal­i­for­nia and Con­necti­cut to be accepted and for them to send us Police Cer­tifi­cates, along with Mass­a­chu­setts, who for some rea­son didn’t need fingerprints.

It’s a hell of a way to enter into the Hol­i­day Sea­son, but it’s as if those unread­able prints have thrown us right back to the start­ing line. That’s not entirely accu­rate, but it sure feels that way.

I don’t think that words can express our level of frus­tra­tion and disappointment.