The Emigration Waiting Game



Borrowed photo

Nobody tells you this when you start the whole emigration process but waiting is the name of the game. The waiting can half drive you mad if you are not so careful. I know that the recent changes in the Canadian immigration process is directed at making the timelines for the applicants much more reasonable (mainly so that they do not have to wait long) but it doesn't make it any easier. At the end of the day, there is still an amount of waiting involved.

After receiving confirmation that our initial application was accepted, I was happily going through the motions of compiling all the documents to meet the 120-day deadline, blissfully unaware that in just a few months, the rules of Canadian immigration was gonna change, yet again.

The new occupations list came out on June 2010, right as I was finishing up my compilation. The list contained preferred applicants in a certain field of work, and "accountants" were no longer part of the desired occupations. Horrors of horrors! I was livid. I quickly rounded up the missing items on our requirements and submitted all documents well within the given period of 120 days. Even personally taking the document pack to the Canadian High Commission in Pretoria.

However, from this point onwards, we heard nothing else. And so our waiting began.

All that waiting was a killer! During that time, every tidbit and ounce of news, good or bad, is....well, influential and life-changing, also in a good or bad way. I cannot imagine how it felt for those applicants who have been waiting since 2005. "No news is good news" does not definitely apply in the emigration books.

You are able to track your application progress on the CIC website. This helped a bit during those cold, winter, lonely nights when I'd lie awake thinking about every inch of each document I had submitted through. The words "Received By Visa Office" although comforting at first, became a bit tiring after the umpteenth month. The status remained that way for 8 months or so until some glimmer of hope eventually came our way. It was not the light at the end of the tunnel though. More waiting awaited us.