Words can't express the contempt I have for the global bureaucracy that has stranded my family abroad for nearly 3 years.
⌛ Time Can't Be Given Back 🙅♂️
A few months ago I received an external hard drive and a new SSD to replace my frozen HDD, allowing me to recover lots of photos from our past in Cambodia. Today I was missing our life in Cambodia very much, so I began looking through our recovered photos.
I immediately noticed how full of smiles and positive vibes we were before being stranded abroad here in Suriname. We never imagined going abroad for a few months to get legally married would strand us abroad just before a global pandemic would exponentially complicate things.
🤦♂️ So Much Regret
For the first time in each of our lives, @sreypov and I had some relative economic stability, a successful microbusiness, and enjoyed lots of free time with family and friends. Ultimately we decided having legal family rights would give us a better future for various bureaucratic reasons.
We sold everything we had (it wasn't much), condensed life to some rolling luggage, and figured we would fly to Ecuador for a marriage/honeymoon/vacation, and return within three months. We weren't worried about returning to Cambodia nearly broke because it only takes $500 a good idea to start a successful business in Cambodia.
⛔ Tired Of Bureaucracy 🛃
Things have gone about as surprisingly wrong as possible. Fast forward nearly three years and we've lost everything, currently stranded in Suriname nearly 3 years, a place we never intended to live, but unable to return to Cambodia or immigrate to the USA, this is our "home."
I miss using the seat of a random motorbike to share a sugarcane juice with Monkey-B, the amount of free-time I used to have with my family to make memories, and the economic means to do so. I miss watching Srey-Yuu win random household items (like an iron) for being awesome student, and I miss taking homemade birthday cakes to an Indian restaurant for a special night out away from home.
Even now, supposedly within three months of getting an interview date for the US Embassy in Guyana, we have borders to cross and visas to obtain before even having a chance to possibly fail an interview at the American Embassy.
The staff at the US Embassy here seems to think we won't be able to travel to Guyana from Suriname nor be able to arrange an interview with the US Embassy there due to pandemic-related problems. We have mounds of paperwork, vaccines, physical exams, bio-scans, and so many more things standing in our way of simply moving across imaginary magical lines know as nation-states.
🧗 Hanging On By A Thread 😤
We now suffer mental health issues from the isolation of life in Suriname, lack of friends and family, hyperinflation and other financial problems, the lack of work, and well, I should stop now because I could go on and on.
It's degrading to have my freedom of movement and ability to earn a livable wage taken away from me by iniquity workers who've never lived through the struggles they force those under their control to endure. My daughters are now on the verge of growing up with only a partial childhood, and I will never forgive those responsible for these conditions.
We should be allowed to tackle this pandemic and global economic crisis on familiar territory like the USA or Cambodia. I find I can no longer even stay in the same room when I hear someone talking about voting, governments, saying nationalistic things. I immediately get filled with rage, and I don't like the person I've become over the last several years.
All I can do is give thanks to you Hivers for providing a safe place to vent my frustrations and concerns, and it turn allow me to earn enough to keep the family fed, clothed, and sheltered.
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