I was listening to the latest episode of This American Life (Abdi and the Golden Ticket) yesterday. It's the story of one man in Kenya trying to emigrate to the United States, amid very dangerous and tenuous circumstances. We have very little in common with him - no police hunting us down, no aversion to taking public transportation for fear of being branded a terrorist - save one thing: we are also trying to move to a foreign country, from a foreign country (Abdi is Somali but living in Kenya). So when the episode started talking about the documents and stamps and permissions and transcripts and copies Abdi needed to collect in order to be granted a US visa - MAYBE - I couldn't help but sympathize in an extreme way.
The thing is, it is almost impossible to successfully do everything necessary to exit one country and enter another, legally, at least on your first try. And even if all your paperwork is in order, and you visited all the ministries and embassies and typing centers you were supposed to, the Powers that Be can still say "nah, you're not going. All those plans you made? That apartment you packed up, that job you gave notice at, that school from which you withdrew your children? Good luck getting it all back."
Fortunately, everything is still in order for our move to Finland. I will always remember that special feeling of sitting an embassy waiting room, counting down the minutes until some official decided our future.
As for leaving the UAE - boy howdy did they make it hard. Among the things we had to do, amidst all the packing up and emotional upheaval:
- close our bank account
- cancel our residency visa (in our passports)
- sell our car
- rent another car to use until we left
- cancel our car insurance
- cancel our SALIK (toll gate) card
- cancel our Emirates IDs
These kinds of to-do lists are the last things you have time for when you're trying to pack up your life. But still, all in all, not too bad, right? Until you realize that these tasks form a complex web of that Wolf/Goat/Cabbage game. Certain items cannot be completed without certain other items having been done/not done. And if you do things wrong, you're hosed. We experienced an unexpected delay in selling our car, waiting for some paperwork from the bank. (It was one of those times where we had to just go to the bank every day and sit in front of the banker's desk for an hour or two until stuff got done - do you ever have those times?) I don't know what we would have done if we had saved that task until the day before we left!
But in the end, that delay was fortuitous since it kept us from cancelling our visas (what turned out to be) too early, which would have presented serious problems with transferring money out of our bank account before closing it, etc.
The overall impression the process leaves is that of "this has never been done before." We were asking people questions about what to do first and we got so many shrugged shoulders and "I have no clue" responses. It was weird. It was like no foreigner has ever left that country before. And it was frustrating.
But we did it! Or at least I think so, until some new, previously unknown, uncompleted task rears its head.
