Lining up the ducks to come home

Just when I thought our journey to Vietnam was as interesting, stressful, exciting and impossible as it could get, our trip home falls into the same category!


A bit about immigration...
We had 2 options with respect to obtaining Canadian citizenship for My. One was to have her arrive as a "landed immigrant" and proceed with the immigration process. This can take a couple of years and the Canadian Immigration Canada's system is notoriously fraught with poor process and delays. This process does work, but it takes a long time. The other way is for her to become a Canadian citizen automatically upon landing in Canada. This is great...but there is a big caveat. With this type of citizenship, she can not pass her Canadian citizenship onto her children. For her children to become Canadian citizens, the father must be a Canadian and pass his citizenship or the children must be born in Canada and obtain Canadian citizenship this way. We chose the automatic citizenship route for both Natalie and Piper. It does seem like a second class type of citizenship. We did not made the decision lightly. Our thoughts are that a lot can change between adoption and the time they are ready to have children and, the likely hood of the father not being Canadian or the children not being born in Canada is low.

After the adoption, there were a couple more steps in the process before we could bring Piper home:
1) While we had applied a couple of years ago for citizenship for Piper, we had to complete the process. This entailed couriering a large package of paperwork to the Canadian High Commission in Singapore. The High Commission is responsible for finishing the processing of the file completing the immigration process and issuing the "Grant of Citizenship". This process is quick- usually 5-10 days but they can rush if they need to.
2)The High Commission notifies the Canadian Embassy in Hanoi, Vietnam that the Grant of Citizenship is complete. This provides the authority that the Canadian embassy requires to print a temporary Canadian passport for the child. The passport has a white cover- rather than the usual black cover.

In order for the Canadian High Commission to begin working on the citizenship, one of the required criteria that we had to meet was that we planned to travel back to Canada "imminently". This criteria is satisfied with the travel itinerary from our flights home. We had to book a return flight (not one way) to be eligible for Vietnam visa's. So we booked return flights through the flight center. I wanted to have the name and personal contact rather than a call center or online third party travel booking company. We guessed at the return date, knowing we would need to change it at some point. In an earlier post, I told the story that when we booked this flight, we planned to leave Canada on March 22. A couple of days after booking, the global landscape was changing fast due to the spread of COVID-19. Borders were closing and flights were bring cancelled. At this time, we realized that if we had a chance of getting this adoption completed, we needed to leave ASAP. Steve went to flight center and we moved our departing flights up to March 14. We already had our Vietnam visitor visa's in hand, the entry date was March 22. We had planned to go through the "Visa on arrival" process at the airport after landing. The day before we were set to leave, Vietnam suspended the visa on arrival option. We worked closely with the Vietnam Embassy in Vancouver, and got so lucky to get last minute 1 month Visa's dated March 14th that would allow us into the country. We were told to put away these visa's once we landed and only use the ones we originally had. She said that having 2 visa's in hand makes thing complicated for us. We dutifully followed her instruction.

Shortly after we arrived in Vietnam, our return flight was cancelled. We no longer could prove imminent travel. We tried to work with Flight Center and it seemed easy peasy as we had a person to email that would provide all the help we needed- but then.....the emails stopped coming and we received no response from the two travel agents working on our file for 5 days. At home, companies were laying off staff and businesses were closing. We didn't know if Flight Center had been impacted. What we did know was that we needed to get new flights booked to get the paperwork moving, and they were radio silent. We could not wait for them. We then abandoned Flight Center and booked new flights through Flight Hub that departed June 4th. It was my least favorite option, but there were not a lot of flights and they had the best flights for us. We got extra cancellation insurance and forwarded the itinerary to the High Commission in Singapore so to trigger the processing of Piper's "Grant of Citizenship".

A few days later, 2 of the 3 flights in our trip were cancelled. We did not report the cancellation to the High Commission. We carried on as though we were travelling on June 4th. We realized that there was little point in booking more flights until we had the temporary passport in hand.

On June 1st, I checked with the Canadian Embassy in Hanoi on the progress of our file. The contact there said that she had not received notification from the High Commission in Singapore that Piper's Grant of Citizenship had been completed and that she was concerned as it was taking quite a long time. I asked her if she could check with Singapore. She told me that she would not be able to advocate for us. This surprised me as I saw it more as 2 arms of the Canadian government working through one process. We had already met the criteria for Piper to be granted citizenship, it was just the processing of the paperwork that was needed. I shook my head in disbelief, ready to follow up with the High Commission.

I called the front desk of the High Commission and learned quickly that the immigration section does not have a phone. They communicate through email only. I explained the challenge I was having and the kind lady gave me a few more email addresses to direct my request for urgent assistance to. Ultimately, I emailed 6 inboxes and then the magic happened. On June 4th, I received an email from the Canadian Embassy in Hanoi that she had received authorization to print the temporary passport and that it was ready. I left a few minutes later to pick it up; soon I had that precious white passport with her sweet little picture in my hands.

On the way to the embassy, I started looking for flights home...again. Up until then, there were two route options still open to get us home- through Tokyo or Seoul. On the morning on June 3rd, Japan announced that foreigners coming from many countries, including Vietnam would not be permitted to transit through Japan. This option dried up...we only had Seoul left. There was a thought that Seoul might follow suit.

I found great flights for a great price- it left June 5th at 00:30. While we loved our time in Vietnam and our dear friends there, given the anticipated uncertainty, it was time to come home.

Thinking we were leaving the following day just after midnight, we got a jump on packing. By 9pm we were 95% packed and looking forward to spending the following day with our friends. Then Steve said "Something is not adding up with the flight duration, layovers, time changes and departure time". This is when we realized......we were actually set to leave in 3.5 hours. The apartment we had lived in for 3 months was not clean, the fridge was full, the dishes were dirty....the airport was 35 minutes away and we didn't have a ride....we started moving really fast!