Here you will find announcements, updates, thoughts, and photographs, relating to our ongoing, round-the-world quest for life experience and personal freedom.
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Of course, if we had the money, we’d buy our way into USA, in a New York minute!
Don’t forget, I need a country too. My own (I hesitate to call Canada a country) country doesn’t want my wife to be my equal, so I’m not too keen on being Canadian, myself. Especially after the last 12 years. Actually, I’m rather embarrassed to be Canadian.
Okay, it’s 24 hours later and neither of us is dead. We’re standing down our suicide watch and examining what happened: going through the game Canada played and how they played it.
For instance, the rejection notification was sent to our very first (and now deceased) immigration lawyer. It was almost 11 years since we had dealt with him, or he had any interaction with Immigration on our behalf. His daughter intercepted the official rejection, or we would never have known until the option to appeal had long expired (this was very likely their intention). They had our current lawyer’s info, of course, she submitted the documentation. Although Canada Immigration (in all its different names and guises) put our lives on hold for six years, jerking us around for 2200 days over a citizenship application, they are required to allow us 30 days to file an appeal.
To reiterate: they get 2200 days to trash our lives, and we get 30 days to appeal… Canada: gotta love it, eh!
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In brief:
Charitably, it’s inaccurate and incompetent. Realistically, it’s fictional and malicious.
In more detail:
The application was finalized immediately following a reporter’s inquiries from The Daily Beast.
This begs the question: would anything have happened without the media’s intervention?
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In reference to the continuing story of Elena and Meg, the lesbian couple that escaped from Russia by sailboat 12 years ago: Canada just officially rejected Elena’s application for citizenship. It puts us in a very precarious position. We were hoping to go on with the dream of traveling the world that we missed on our escape. This means we can’t do it together, and my wife, Elena, has no protections or the same rights as I do. In other words we are denied the rights taken for granted by other Canadian families, and although we’ve been together for more than 12 years, we are not citizens of the same country. Makes the concept of “home” tenuous, at best.
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And that’s it, Meg and I won’t be a Canadian family, because I won’t be Canadian citizen.
I cried, Meg didn’t. We both feel like it is the end of our lives, because for us freedom is part of life, when it’s gone, it is jail. There will be no safety for us, no right to plan our lives, no choices.
There comes a time in every story’s evolution when words are not enough. For us that time is now — well, it was probably a few weeks ago; but still, there’s that saying about late and never… or maybe it’s shit and pots — either way, we have GOT TO MAKE A MOVIE.
Meg here… The following is one of the very few translated passages of Elena’s, Russian language, memoir. I have replaced her fictional character names with our own. I am posting it below because it explains why she called her book, Talking to the Moon.
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In 2014 I placed online, for free download, a colossal work of fiction called THE RUSSIAN FACTOR: Two Women, One Planet, Incredible Odds. If you guessed that this was based on our wild, run-for-our-lives from Russia, your guess would be correct. It was, however, a fictionalization of our motivation to run.