We had a fantastic visit home to the UK in June and you’ll hear a lot about that on some blogs to follow (and Sam has already written about the delights of hotel quarantine). Pre-empting those comments, and to avoid this more downbeat blog implying we didn’t love coming home, I will just touch on some of the great things we did….Wales with Mum & Dad in their cottage, mountain-biking, zip-lining, visiting a pub(!)….Tatton Park with Sam’s brother’s family…Beverley and Hull seeing lots of people including the Nolans for dinner and Imogen spending half a day at Hull Collegiate (thank you, Alex Wilson)…..Lostock Green with Mic & Annabel and also seeing the Howards…..camping in the Peak District with lots of friends and a particular highlight of Harriett leading the other 5 kids up a mountain (and safely back down)……a visit to Weymouth to see Granddad (Sam’s Granddad) looking so well and the great view from the Lookout café and a fabulous couple of days with Ed & Vicky (what amazing British weather for boating!)…..and finally a return to Cheshire and time with parents, my sister and her husband.
So back to the main point of this blog; having lived abroad for a year, we have now had a little bit of a glimpse into what Britain is like as a place for ‘foreigners’ and it is quite eye-opening. We wanted to visit family and friends and to get home for a while – and the girls were especially keen to do so – but even had we not wanted to, we would have had to return in order to satisfy the surprisingly tortuous British bureaucracy. This is a bit of a saga that Sam has alluded to in a couple of blogs before….
We arrived in Mozambique in March 2020, assuming that we would return to visit ‘home’ a couple of times a year. Obviously, Covid rather changed those plans to the extent that after a year living here, we hadn’t been home and Sam and Harriett’s passports were due to expire in a few months and there still (back in March) wasn’t an obvious way we would make it home.
Sam tried to contact the British High Commission in Mozambique to renew the passports; we first tried their website, which directs you to the standard UK government site. We then tried to phone them, but they have a permanent recorded message sending you to the (useless) website. We tried to physically visit them, to find they have a guard posted outside whose job appears to be to prevent visitors from getting anywhere near the High Commission itself and handing out flyers with the (again useless) web address, declaring “Bob’s your uncle!”
This wasn’t our first experience of the British High Commission in Mozambique; they were equally unhelpful when we tried to contact them on arrival in Mozambique, just to make contact and let them know we existed. Our only other indirect interaction was when using the Government travel advice website when Sam’s parents came to visit; the advice on that website for entry to Mozambique has been wrong ever since we arrived in Mozambique and stated you cannot get visas on entry to Mozambique which is in reality the only way to get visas to enter Mozambique. Fortunately, the check-in staff at Manchester Airport were prepared to look at the US government advice website instead, for the correct advice and so let Mic & Annabel board without advance visas. Anyway, that’s a deviation, but it gives a sense of the quality of British bureaucracy we’ve experienced from abroad so far (although I have to say, the British High Commissioner herself is by all accounts a very lively, smart and engaging person….but I don’t actually know because I’ve never met her….it is the bureaucratic surrounding processes that are poor).
Having given up on resolving the passport renewal problem through the high Commission, Sam telephoned the UK passport office, who were pleasantly helpful. Explaining that we could not follow the normal process of sending off the old passports before receiving the new ones because we were abroad and needed our passports at all times (they contain our residency permits, which are frequently checked at road blocks and such like; being without them would likely result in gaining rather too much familiarity with the inside of the Mozambican prison service) the passport office helpfully said they understood the problem for overseas residents and we should post our applications without the old passports, providing those later when we were able to do so. Posting the application sounded rather crazy; they literally wanted us to fill in online forms, print them and post them….surely email would be quicker. Nonetheless, we did so, paying around $80 courier fees in the meantime and sat awaiting the response.
A couple of weeks later, the full extent of the saga that was to play out became clear, when we received an email from UKPO saying their own helpline was wrong and they could not issue new passports without first receiving the old one. Several long-winded conversations and unanswered emails followed over the next few weeks and eventually the whole crazy Catch 22 was clear:
- We had to send our old passports before we could get new ones
- We could not legally be in Mozambique without the old passports
- The UK put Mozambique on the Red List of countries from where they did not want anyone travelling to the UK
- We were forced by the UK passport office to travel to the UK and so do exactly what the UK government did not want anyone to do in order to satisfy their own bureaucracy
- Because we initially applied for our passports from Mozambique, UKPO would only send the new ones there too….but we needed them to return from the UK to Mozambique
I will spare you the rest of the drama, but you get the idea. Ours was just a taste of the UK’s infamous “hostile environment” policy to deter migrants. It has given me a new awareness of just how unwelcoming a community we can be. Out of interest I Googled hostile environment (bear in mind this is from Africa, not the UK) and the results are shown below…it doesn’t lead to images of war zones, famines, other global natural disasters, conditions in dictatorships, etc. – no, the top hits are all about the UK.
It is little wonder that seemingly every shop, restaurant and farm in the UK is desperately seeking workers; we have scared off much of the foreign workforce that keeps us running.
That’s enough of a rant about UK bureaucracy – in reality, we got to the UK, despite hours and hours of effort from Sam, with help from quite a few others too (thanks Mum and Dad!) and he and Harriett got their new passports OK – and we had an amazing time. It was an eye opening experience, though, and somewhat shattered my previous prejudice about the efficiency of the UK.
As an aside, I’ll give a quick update on Covid – the 2nd wave has arrived in Mozambique now and we know the delta variant is present, although we don’t know what proportion of cases are attributable to the delta variant. We have a number of cases on the cane estate (15) none of which, fortunately, are serious. Hospitals have been filling up but there still seems to be capacity; it is a more concerning situation that we have had previously, but appears to be levelling off at around 1,500 national cases per day (the real number will be much higher, given limited testing, but the official numbers are useful for monitoring the trends). The peak day saw 20 deaths. As a result of the new wave of cases, there is also a new round of restrictions with schools closed in urban areas for 30 days; a curfew from 9pm; restaurants and takeaways closed from 6pm; limited shop opening hours and closed beaches are the main restrictions.
By contrast, the UK has around 50,000 new cases per day and around 50 deaths per day. And from Monday the only restrictions still in force will be to stop visitors arriving from countries like Mozambique….
Our next door neighbour, a Canadian diplomat, gently pointed out to us that the WHO had lambasted England’s approach to lifting Covid control measures as “moral emptiness and epidemiological stupidity”….Ouch! (We long ago decided, by the way, that should any serious mishap befall us in Mozambique, we are heading straight to the Canadian High Commission for help….we hope and think they would let us in!.
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