“Oh God, is life as I know it over,” I asked myself while waiting in line under the baking Nigerian sun in front of the American Consulate in Lagos. The prospect of losing my friends, my home, and my life in America caused me to shiver with fear in spite of the scorching 100-degree heat.
It was May 2003, nearly 5 weeks since my father, younger brother, and I had landed in Nigeria for what was meant to be a two-week excursion. The Rhode Island School of Design had just offered my father a teaching post, but in order for him to accept the position, he would need to return to Nigeria and change our family’s visa status from that of temporary aliens to permanent residents. What was to be a simple matter of immigration legality, however, turned …show more content…
By the third week, we were finally informed that visa status hearings were held specifically on Thursdays when the appropriate official was available. The next Thursday, our fourth in Nigeria, we finally met with the surly visa-status official. She brusquely reviewed our documents and began to question my father while my brother and I sat patiently by the side. I was used to this process from when my mother used to bring me to the consulate five years before as she worked tirelessly to gain a visa in order to reunite our family with my father in America. Consequently, while watching the proceedings of my father’s meeting, I immediately recognized that the meeting seemed to be going smoothly. But to my shock, after the interview session, the consulate official claimed to have found discrepancies with our status. She asserted that we had overextended our visa and had been in fact illegal aliens for a period of time. She then declared that she would be recommending to the State Department that our family be forced to return to Nigeria and refused entry into the United States for seven years as punishment. We were then abruptly escorted out of the consulate and sent back to my uncle’s house to ponder the outcome of our
It was May 2003, nearly 5 weeks since my father, younger brother, and I had landed in Nigeria for what was meant to be a two-week excursion. The Rhode Island School of Design had just offered my father a teaching post, but in order for him to accept the position, he would need to return to Nigeria and change our family’s visa status from that of temporary aliens to permanent residents. What was to be a simple matter of immigration legality, however, turned …show more content…
By the third week, we were finally informed that visa status hearings were held specifically on Thursdays when the appropriate official was available. The next Thursday, our fourth in Nigeria, we finally met with the surly visa-status official. She brusquely reviewed our documents and began to question my father while my brother and I sat patiently by the side. I was used to this process from when my mother used to bring me to the consulate five years before as she worked tirelessly to gain a visa in order to reunite our family with my father in America. Consequently, while watching the proceedings of my father’s meeting, I immediately recognized that the meeting seemed to be going smoothly. But to my shock, after the interview session, the consulate official claimed to have found discrepancies with our status. She asserted that we had overextended our visa and had been in fact illegal aliens for a period of time. She then declared that she would be recommending to the State Department that our family be forced to return to Nigeria and refused entry into the United States for seven years as punishment. We were then abruptly escorted out of the consulate and sent back to my uncle’s house to ponder the outcome of our