Hope and Heartache

After our day-long meeting with the Yemeni and US government officials, Ahmed had agreed to lift the travel ban on me so I could go home to see my dying father, and he also promised to lift the ban on the children and let them return home once I got an official paper stating that, if anything happened to me, that Ahmed would get custody of the children. That night, I got my plane tickets to go home.

At the embassy, I had gotten replacement passports for my kids. Before I left the embassy, however, David Fuller came to me and said, “You should leave the kids’ passports here with me. If you take them with you, Ahmed could get a hold of them again and take them, or you could lose them. If you leave them with me, I will put them in a file and lock them up in the filing cabinet, and when you get back to the States, then contact me and I will send them to you. It will be safer that way.” So, I agreed, and I handed him the three kids’ passports.

HUGE mistake. Lesson number 1 (well, probably more like lesson number 52…): NEVER TRUST THE US GOVERNMENT TO DO WHAT THEY SAY THEY’RE GOING TO DO!

I got on a plane and left the next morning. My kids were crying and so very, very upset. They couldn’t stand for me to leave them there alone with him and his family. I couldn’t stand it, either. But my father was dying, and I had little choice. There was no way to get the kids to come home with me. I had to go take care of business.

I arrived home Oct. 31, 2006. I had sold my car to get my third set of plane tickets to go to Yemen to see my kids, so I was without transportation. I was trying to get to the hospital to see my father, so on Nov. 1, I borrowed a friend’s car to make the one-hour drive to the hospital where he was. I got halfway when the car broke down in the middle of nowhere. I left the house at 8 am, but by the time I finally got a tow truck and was able to get towed home, I arrived back at my house at 4:05 pm. I didn’t make it to the hospital. As soon as I walked in the door, the phone rang. It was the hospital. My father had just died. I didn’t get to see him.

My father had left a will, and I spent the next several months dealing with the lawyers and estate stuff. He had left a substantial trust fund for each of my three children, on the condition that they retain their US citizenship and reside in the United States. He set it up so that the money would remain in trust until they came back the States to live.

My first concern, after the funeral, of course, was to contact David Fuller at the US Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen and get my kids’ passports. I contacted him within a few days of arriving hom. I emailed him over and over again, and I got no response. I called and left messages on his desk phone. He never answered, and he never returned my phone calls. For almost two months, I tried contacting him relentlessly to ask for him to send me the kids’ passports. There was no way to get a hold of him, since he refused to respond to any of my attempts to contant him.

Finally, two months later, I received an email from the State Dept in Washington DC saying, “David Fuller said to tell you that there are no more passports for your children”. That’s it. That’s all the email said. I was stunned and in shock. I wrote back, saying, “What do you MEAN there are no passports? I left them with David Fuller because he told me to. He promised to keep them safe and send them to me when I got back to the US. What happened?” The State Dept emailed me back and just said, “David said the kids’ passports got spoiled”. I wrote back and said, “What do you mean by “spoiled”? Are they made out of bologna?? What happened?” I got no response.

So, I kept contacting the State Dept. I never got a response as to what happened to the passports, although I already knew that Ahmed had paid David to have them destroyed. I know Ahmed very, very well. I was shocked, however, to find out how US government employees could be corruptible. You hear about such things, but you always think it’s just conspiracy-theory stuff or stories people make up. In other countries -yeah, but not employees of the United States government!

I asked them to send me replacement passports. They told me that was impossible. They said that I would have to show up at the embassy in Sanaa or at a designated passport application center in the United States with my children and go through the regular application process all over again. I told them that they knew that was impossible. I could not show up with the kids to obtain replacement passports. They said, “Well, there’s nothing we can do”.

I asked them repeatedly to send me the “spoiled” passports. They told me that the passports no longer existed. I asked if there was a way to apply for a waiver from the “must apply in person with the children” requirement. I was told there was no way to do that. They said that I must re-apply and to re-apply in person with the children present and with written permission from the father. I eventually gave up on that quest when no one, from either the embassy in Sanaa or the State Dept in Washington DC, would respond to anymore of my emails or phone calls.

Without passports, I had absolutely no way to fight for my kids to come home to America.  I even called the FBI to ask for the numbers of my kids’ last-issued passports.  I was told, “We don’t have that information”.  What a joke!  Just a month earlier, I had been on the phone with them and they, at that time, had a question about my middle daughter’s passport.  While the agent was on the phone with me, she had the passport file displayed on her computer screen and was quoting me a date from that file.  Now, all of a sudden, I was not allowed to get the passport numbers of my own children’s passports. Suddenly, they “didn’t have access to that information”.

Note: I know that it is politically incorrect to say anything negative about the US Government. People get quite angry when you speak up about such things. But I can assure you that I have had so many experiences that there is no way to deny that there are US government employees working at the US Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen who are corrupt and who take money from influential Yemeni people and serve their interests rather than doing the job they are paid to do and serving the US citizens they are paid to reperesent. For those who want to bash me for telling what I know to be true, I say this: Walk in my shoes, experience what I’ve experienced, see what I’ve seen, and THEN you have the right to stand up and call me some crazy, lying, conspiracy-theory-type freak. I knw what I know. And I’m certainly not sharing everything I know here. Some information puts my children at risk, and I wouldn’t dare share anything that endangers my children more than they’re already endangered.