Christmas wish comes true for joyful Anoush

Anoush Safatzadeh and his parents, Ali and Marjam, came to the City primarily to learn English as a spoken language, but had to leave in October due to changes in the immigration legislation which impacted on their Visas. While they are currently living in London the family still may face the prospect of having to return to Iran.

A pupil at Long Tower Primary School while he lived in Londonderry, Anoush and his parents are of the Muslim tradition, and he joined the choir at St Columb’s Cathedral after meeting other Choristers who had gathered at the Cathedral gates for a kick-about with a football one day after choir practice.

“Anoush made great friends in the choir and we were delighted to have him as a member despite the difference in religion. His parents were very liberally-minded in letting him join and even attended some of the services themselves,” said the Dean of Derry, Very Rev Dr William Morton.

“It was a sad day for them and for all of us in the Cathedral the day they left. Two of my boys, Nicky and Conor, kept in touch with Anoush by telephone, and it was relayed to us that Anoush would like to come back and wanted to sing in the Nine Lessons and Carols and also at Christmas, and Nicky decided that he would organise it. He and two boys out of the choir, Ronan Sneddon and Dylan Harvey, undertook to travel to London and bring him home for Christmas,” the Dean said.

However, that is when the boys’ good intentions got tied up in red tape.

“Because as a family they had to submit their passports to the Home Office so that an extension to their stay in the UK could be registered, the passports had been submitted in October, and they were told it would be between four and 14 weeks before they would get them back. It looked like no passports would be available and the possibility that Anoush might not get back was talked about and I spoke to Ali about it.

“When I approached William Hay last week and gave him the details, he asked his constituency worker Bill Irwin to work on it with him and they put in a lot of effort to get the passport released. After much contact and to-ing and fro-ing on Wednesday night it looked like we had not been successful and we were told we would not know until Thursday. That left things very tight for organising the return flights, but on Thursday at 3.40pm we got the news we had been waiting for and my Churchwarden Ian Bartlett was able to arrange the flights,” said a delighted Dean.

On Friday Ali and Anoush got up at 5am to travel to Croydon to collect their passport. They arrived at the offices at 9am, but the passport was not released until Noon, and that left them with a mad dash to Stansted Airport to get Anoush on the plane ‘home’.

“It was really tight going, but we are absolutely delighted to have Anoush with us for Christmas and he is delighted to be back with his friends. It was an amazing piece of outreach by the Church and out local politicians, whom I want to thank for their efforts,” he said.

MLA William Hay also praised his DUP colleague Bill Irwin, and said that they had “never encountered anything like the bureaucracy and the attitude from the Foreign Office and Customs” in trying to bring Anoush home.

“We really had to go the second and third mile with this. It was unbelievable, especially at Christmas. We stressed that we were working with a nine-year-old boy, but it made no difference, but we got there in the end,” said Mr Hay.