It has been almost a year since I last posted on this blog. I have been so busy with life and, well, everything. But in the past year since my last post, I have learnt one very crucial lesson, whoever said "ignorance is bliss" must have come from some utopia where what you do not know can not harm you...
Six months ago, I was sitting in a queue in an immigration office. Beside me was a woman in her late 50s who was waiting to find out if her permit had been approved. Because we had to sit for a while, we ended up chatting. She told me a rather sad story of how she had lived in this country for more than 15 years but there was no record that she had been here because she was undocumented. She told me of how her husband had informed her at a time when there was some documentation process almost similar to the one she had now applied for in the 1990s that she could not go and apply, because the documentation was meant for men only.
Shocked, i asked her why he had allowed her to come along this time around and she said, he was dead now. She told me that she had come to the Home Affairs Office with her dead husband's passport in the hope that she could be incorporated on his status (he was a permanent resident at the time of his death). The Home Affairs had told her that it was no longer possible for her to apply for such documentation in view of the fact that this person she was claiming to be her spouse was dead and there was no evidence that he was actually married her (she was married traditionally to him). The good news had however been that since she was a Zimbabwean, there was some documentation process underway and then they referred her to the queue at the back of the office. And so she found herself in that office at the time.
Her story is just one of many people who have just fallen through the cracks in the system of migration, either knowing or unknowingly. I just started thinking of the struggles this woman went through trying to run away from the police and how much she was vulnerable. I was also quite saddened by the level of ignorance she had, as to not question her husband's position that the earlier documentation would only apply to men... also wondered why the husband abused her ignorance and kept her undocumented for so long... maybe it was a way of ensuring that he could control her better.
Whatever your answers maybe to this issue, what I learnt from this woman's story is just that, Ignorance is not bliss after all. The fact that she did not know that she could actually be documented in the 1990s, did not change the law, it did not change the fact that if she had been caught without documentation (and its a miracle that she was not caught) she would have been deported...
My advice, ask questions. You will be surprised at how asking a question in the most broken form of English or French or Swahili can be what differentiates your destiny from that of the next person. I am just thinking, if this woman had not gathered the guts to go to Home Affairs to establish how she could benefit from her husband's permanent residency, she could have found herself missing yet another opportunity to be documented.
This is me, trying to find my voice again after a whole year in the shell of life, I hope this shot piece helps someone out there :)
