Yohannes Zewed, 12, and his
mom Selam Ayele in Canada.
[Sharon Tiffin/News staff]

A Victoria mother has been reunited with her Ethiopian son after immigration delays kept an ocean between the two for more than nine years.

Backlogs at Immigration Canada mean many applications aren’t processed in their average timeframe. It took seven-and-a-half years for Selam Ayele to become a landed immigrant, and another two-and-a-half years for her to be allowed to bring her son over. She had no idea it would take so long.

“It’s like I’ve spent half my life just trying to live here,” said Ayele, who was 21 when she moved to Victoria, away from her son Yohannes Zewed who was three at the time.

Now almost a teenager, Zewed, 12, is shy around his mother who he knew only as the voice who phoned him every second day when he lived with his father, attending English schools in Ethiopia.

“It feels like I have a life again,” said Zewed. “I was dead in Ethiopia. Here I am alive.”

Before moving to Victoria, Ayele said, she could count the times she didn’t have her baby boy with her.

“I couldn’t be away from him,” she said. “I was a first-time mother; he meant everything to me.”

And while she didn’t want to share the specifics of why she left Ethiopia, she said a marriage turned nasty and lack of education and job prospects played a major role.

“No mother would leave a son behind for nothing. It was bad there,” she said.

But immigration wasn’t easy, either. For the first two years she suffered from anxiety and needed sleeping pills at night.

She wanted to be a nurse, but visa restrictions prevented her from even taking a job cleaning the hospitals and she couldn’t study full-time until she was a landed immigrant.

“It was so frustrating,” said Ayele. “All the time I had to go in (to the Immigration office) and be questioned like a criminal … I lived here. I worked sometimes two or three jobs.

“And I’d do things for the community – there was no daycare, so I got a certificate (through part-time studies) and opened a daycare. It was a lot. I felt like I had to prove I was here to work.”

The day after becoming a landed immigrant, Ayele signed up for nursing classes and now works in hospitals as a nursing assistant.

“I see how understaffed they are and think there wouldn’t be the problem if immigration wasn’t so hard.”

But, that wasn’t even the worst of it. When Ayele tried to bring her son over, she had to work with the Canadian Embassy in Nairobi, which was the nearest one to Ethiopia.

While in Canada your case got a tracking number to follow its progress online, in Nairobi they just tell people to wait. And wait.

Mail only goes between the countries once a week. It wasn’t unusual for letters to arrive in Canada asking for a document within a 30 day deadline that had already passed. Documents sent repeatedly were lost and required medical exams would expire before they were processed.

When Canada Immigration passed its average processing time on her son’s application, Ayele went to the office of Victoria MP Denise Savoie, for help. Constituency assistant Kelly Newhook said she sees cases like this all the time. She began sending daily e-mails to Nairobi and making calls to Ottawa to help push the case.

On July 3, Savoie spoke in the House of Commons about the family’s struggle. The next day Zewed was finally granted a visa. He’s been in Victoria with his mother for just over a week.

Ayele said it’s hard to see the boy, now taller than her, as the same baby she carried in Ethiopia.

“It’s going to take awhile to get used to saying, ‘that’s my son,’” she said.

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