Posted on 05/27/2007 11:07:35 AM PDT by Graybeard58
Hava Kulla worked hard in a life seldom free of hardship. Now 81, a widow for three years and terminally ill, the Albanian native is more determined than bitter.
She wants her family around her before she dies. It's not as easy as it could be.
"I have no children, I am alone," Kulla said in a thick accent. "I want my nephew and his wife and daughter to come from Albania to be with me at the end of my life. They are all I have left."
It's a request no government agency or official has been able to fill, despite years of trying, hundreds of dollars spent on applications, and plenty of suggestions. Her supporters have included friends, including Mary Tracy who completed the necessary paperwork to sponsor Kulla's nephew, Luan Mulla, and employ him at her Goshen goat farm.
In 2005, Kulla's doctor, Gerard Kruger of Sharon, sent a letter to the U.S. Embassy in Albania. He confirmed that he is treating Kulla for terminal lung cancer.
More recently, Sen. Andrew W. Roraback, R-Goshen, agreed to help the Torrington woman but made no promises. In dealings with federal immigration rules, Roraback said, there is no appealing to sympathy.
Fifty-three years after she was allowed to enter the United States along with other war refugees under the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 42 years after she passed a test to become a U.S. citizen and learned to drive, Kulla isn't ready to give up. She tells her story to anyone who will hear it and travels with a portfolio filled with worn photos of relatives, and her husband's passport photo, which she frequently kisses. She offers letters from government officials including former U.S Rep. Nancy L. Johnson, and Gov. M. Jodi Rell, who are long on sympathy but short on solutions.
Kulla's story is what gets your attention.
Her nephew was 5 years old the last time Kulla saw him in 1951. At the time, both were lucky to be alive.
"I had happy times with my family on a beautiful farm owned by my father and mother next to my uncle, aunt and cousins," she said. "My brother Leitfi was 29 and my cousin Avni 20 when they were captured by Communist soldiers and brutally murdered. Our lives were torn apart by the Communist regime that took over and killed anti-communists.
"In 1947 my older brother Racin was seized, and my father pleaded for his life. My father was beaten and died. Racin was put in prison and tortured for three years. He was suspended from the ceiling, bound by hand and foot, and died an agonizing death."
"He left behind a wife and his 5-year-old son, my nephew," she said. "I escaped with my husband from the camps into Greece on foot. We were given sanctuary in Athens, and lived there for three years. In 1954 we came to the U.S. My beloved husband Abrahim passed away in 2004. We had no children because I had a tumor. I need my family now. I need their love and help and encouragement. Luan needs it too. We need each other."
Kulla toiled most of her life in factories. She made $18 a week sewing ladies underwear in Waterbury in the 1950s. For another 14 years she sat at a machine that made chain links for watches at the Timex plant in Middlebury. She boasts that she made 100 of them in an hour.
Immigration and naturalization rules grant relatively few non-immigrant passes to unskilled workers like Mulla every year. If he is granted a non-immigrant VISA, he will have to return after three years, or apply for an extension. Even then, an immediate relative is more likely than a nephew to gain approval.
Although he couldn't talk about specifics, Shawn Saucier, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service spokesman, said a person could apply for political asylum in the United States but would have to substantiate that he is in peril in his homeland. He could also qualify under humanitarian parole granted through the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement division, the same provision which is allowing high-level Iraqi government officials to seek refuge here.
Sympathy may not be part of the formula, but Hava Kulla deserves more than most. She earned it.
This elderly, dying woman, a legal American citizen, can't bring her relatives here to comfort her in her last days on earth but criminals can and do simply walk across our southern border by the thousands.
How about paying for a ticket for her to Albania?
“How about paying for a ticket for her to Albania?”
That is too sensible a solution. She could probably afford a ticket herself.
Because then the liberal press can’t bitch and moan about what meanies we are.
The communists are gone, so she could go live with her relatives now.
Surely the kindly Albanians living in the USA would be happy to pay her way so she could die in her homeland with her relatives.
Albania - better than even chance that they are Muslims.
It's a much easier solution than bringing an entire family here.
Many of our elderly citizens live alone by choice and when the time comes that they can no longer do that - they move back to where their children and families are.
She’s been here 56 years. She’s had all the time in the world to visit relatives. I have neighbors who go back to their country of origin every year.
According to the 2000 census, 18,785,867 is the total populations combined of Wyoming, Dist. of Columbia, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, New Mexico and Nevada.
THINK about that.
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/usa/states/population.shtml
Since the socialist welfare system in Albania is pretty much hosed, she wants her family to come here and sponge off the American version.
Plus that and someone’s got to replenish the terror cell in the Fort Dix area.
Agreed. This old woman is trying to get her family to the U.S., otherwise she would just go back for her final days.
I’m thinking that maybe Mexico would take a few of our states, and their politicians, in trade for the illegals. That way, we’d actually get something out of this deal. Send them New York, and Vermont, and certainly Delaware, and New Jersey — we don’t have enough pollution offsets to pay for Kalifornia, but they can have that too if they agree to take Massachusetts.
Only in the U.S. can this prattle get by as a sob story. If I moved to any other country in the world and got old and sick, I would fly home to be with them, not ask them to come live in my newly adopted country.
She could never make a trip like that.
From what I've seen first hand, it's generally 3 months from diagnosis to death.
In 2005, Kulla's doctor, Gerard Kruger of Sharon, sent a letter to the U.S. Embassy in Albania. He confirmed that he is treating Kulla for terminal lung cancer.
More recently, Sen. Andrew W. Roraback, R-Goshen, agreed to help the Torrington woman but made no promises. In dealings with federal immigration rules, Roraback said, there is no appealing to sympathy.
They're talking to all the wrong people!
Just get a tourist visa (preferably from a middle-eastern country), as a student or a a tourist... and disappear.
Take airline flying lessons, enroll at a school that will take anybody's money.
Or learn spanish and waltz across the southern border.
One guaranteed way to permanently be barred from visiting the US is to go through the selectively enforced entry channels.
Just saying...
The point is that she did everything legally, and she’s gotten zip from the Feds.
Meanwhile, 20 million illegal aliens are marching in the streets for their “”””rights””””.
Newly adopted country????? She has been here since 1954!
You don’t know what you’d do if you got “old and sick!”
You bet your sweet butt she could make the trip, if she was overseas and wanted to come to the U.S.
Well I want the illegals gone not amnestied too. And, I don’t believe that I would be selfish enough to ask my grown children, who have children of their own, to uproot their lives and go half way around the world to take care of me. It would be much simpler for me to go to them.
But that is just me.................apparently.
Way to much common sense there. But it would seem to me that if she has fond memories of her fathers farm, dieing there would be OK.
I sort of have plans of being planted on my fathers farm one day.
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