It has been a whirlwind here the last several days. In my last entry, I wrote about the obstacles we have been facing.
We are more or less mended from Covid, and A (our son) is no longer banished to a van in a parking lot in the United States. During our bout with Covid, our youngest daughter, J, really stepped up. She did our grocery shopping, ran errands, and was an all-around champion. But through all of this, one of the greatest stressors has been E’s visa application. E was stuck in the United States, her application in bureaucratic limbo while all our other visas had been addressed weeks ago.
Marga continued to call VFS Global every day, sometimes in tears, sometimes with barely contained fury as the visa outsourcing company proved intractably useless. Their mechanisms for support appear designed to prevent people from actually getting help. When Marga could make it through the maze of phone menus and long reference numbers to an actual human being, she still got nowhere. Sometimes a sympathetic support person would try to fish out or track down more information from “the system” regarding E’s vanished visa. Others gave misinformation. Some simply stonewalled Marga. They regularly hung up on her. Each phone conversation was billed to our credit card at a per minute rate. If you ever need a case study for why privatization is no better than government bureaucracy, VFS Global could be your poster child.
Our frustration and desperation grew. “What would you do if it were your daughter stuck on the other side of the ocean?” she would ask. It wasn’t just VFS that Marga was reaching out to. She called embassies and consulates, and told anyone who seemed interested (and some who didn’t) about E’s visa situation in hopes that someone might offer some other solution. We called our local state representative from southwest Michigan in the US. His office was gracious but they were unable to assist us.
Marga’s new boss at Lorne & Islands hospital had suggested she email our government representative here in Scotland, and Marga did so on the 9th of August. She addressed the email to MSP Yousaf Hamza, Scottish Minister of Parliament for the Glasgow region. The name sounded familiar to me, but we aren’t well versed in Scottish politics so it went over my head. I hardly knew what an MP or an MSP was. Fortunately, our daughter was taking a class in Scottish government. She has been able to offer some explanation.
An MSP is a Member of Scottish Parliament. The closest thing to this in the United States may be a representative to our state legislature. An MP is a Member of Parliament for the United Kingdom, roughly analogous to a member of Congress in the US. MP’s and MSP’s have different spheres of activity and entirely different locations, but I am assured that they do work together more than happens in the United States.
Unfortunately, our ignorance had generated two mistakes: Marga had emailed a government official in the Scottish Parliament for a completely different region (outside Argyll) with a request for help on a United Kingdom aspect of governance. And yet somehow her message made it from MSP Hamza’s office through to the UK MP for Argyll and Bute, Brendan O’Hara. At 10:50 in the morning on Tuesday the 16th of August, Marga got an email from Brendan O’Hara asking for further information and permission to help.
Marga emailed him back right away. Just after 3:00 that afternoon, Marga got another email from Brendan O’Hara. He had reached out to the Home Office and E’s visa had been issued! We are still not sure what he and his office did or said, but it made all the difference!
On Thursday the 18th, we saw that the shipping label for her visa had been activated. Marga called her mom to stake out the mail box at our empty house in the United States. E’s visa arrived at 10:00 in the morning ET, and she was at the airport in Chicago by 2:00 that afternoon.
We picked E up from the airport with tears of absolute jubilation the next morning. Each bedroom is now full in our little rented house in Kilmelford. The fridge is too small for the four of us, and we are still figuring out the stove (which is called a “hob” here) and oven (which has most of the temperature markings worn away). Some kitchen utensils had to be bought since we’ve discovered Mac and Cheese is tricky to make with only a fork. We aren’t all together yet, but this victory makes us feel just a bit more whole.
