Getting Visa Invitation

Once the EOI application was submitted, there were more important steps to do. Since I secured 60 points and it was independent skilled visa, I was fairly confident that I will get an invite. It was only a question of when. From various sources, I got different answers based on different historic experiences. Some said it takes average 2-3 months while some others were not so positive and held the opinion that it may take well over 6-8 months. Whoa! Please God, not that long. Before anxiety got the best of me, I hoped for early positive outcome and decided to focus my attention on things which I can do in the meantime.

Birth Certificate Trouble

I had already secured most of the documents and got them notarized for the ACS submission. After adding our daughter’s passport and birth certificate scans to the list, the list looked almost complete. Almost because when I checked the documents checklist for 189 visa application on immigration department website, one document caught me off guard – the birth certificate.

It’s not that I didn’t have birth certificate, but it was in a dreadful state. First, it was on a cardboard which was torn at different places due to neglect over the years and secondly, it was in regional language – Gujarathi since my birth place is Baroda. It was anything but useful. From some people I gathered that using SSC score card can help as it has date of birth, however, since it was not listed on official site, relying on hearsay was a risky business.

(Certified) Born again

I had only one option and that was to get a fresh copy of the birth certificate. There were two problems to that – one is that my birthplace was in a state different than where I was living and secondly, getting a copy of birth certificate after more than 30 years was going to be challenging, given the state of affairs at government organisations.

But I was in luck again (Haven’t I told you, I am lucky!). One of my uncles was working in Municipal Corporation at Baroda. Though he had retired, he still had his connections there. I requested him to help me in this case and he happily agreed. I don’t know what wheels he spun in there, but within a month, I had a fresh new English version of my birth certificate in my hand. Unbelievable! I thanked him profusely for getting it so quickly by cutting through red tape. I got the birth certificate photocopied and notarised, ready to file along with visa application.

Wait Over!

While all this was keeping me occupied, I was making rounds on Immigration website to check for next rounds of invitations, checking expatforums for who got invites and what are the things they are doing next. As the days progressed into weeks, I was getting restless. Sometimes I would get up in the morning 5’0 clock to check my mail for invite. My friends who had gone through this assured me to wait for at least a couple of months before getting ready for invite, but that seemed like a long time. The wait was killing me!

One early morning while checking my mails, I caught sight of something so beautiful I don’t have words to describe it. Here is the screenshot:

Do you see, how mind-blowing that looked? After waiting for more than a month (remember I filed EOI on 14th July), I got this amazing news! Oh my God! Was this really happening? I was invited, which meant I had nearly cleared every obstacle in my way to Australia. Suddenly the thing that was just an ambitious dream turned into reality. One simple idea which was conceived just 8 months ago was soon going to be a life changing event. That whole day I was just floating in the air, being extra kind to everyone and smiling without a reason. No, actually there was a reason, Australia was calling me and I couldn’t wait to lodge my visa application.

Moving To Australia Series