Exiled from America for 17 Years, Now Surviving the COVID – 19 Financial Crisis

Exiled from America for 17 Years, Now Surviving the COVID – 19 Financial Crisis

How do you survive in a foreign country where you cannot legally work? How do you keep your family together when the US government is against it? A mistake US immigration services made gets wife of an American citizen, mother of newborn US citizen banned from returning to the USA for 10 years.

My name is Glenn Madden, and my story is unusual. I am not a person unfamiliar with hard times. My present circumstance is like how I started out from birth. I was born in Clinton, South Carolina at a small doctor’s office. My childhood years were on the outskirts of Ware Shoals SC. We lived in a broken-down wooden house until I was 11 years old. It was then that my dad got a job in Laurens SC. My parents worked out a contract with FHA for a small new brick home and we moved to Laurens. Our lives changed significantly at that point.

To jump forward I got married to a local girl there in Laurens. We were married for 10 years, and then because of irreconcilable differences, we got divorced. I was heartbroken and lost everything. At the time I was traveling with the company I worked for and met a woman in Mexico. I guess you could say I got caught on the rebound and circumstances ended up landing me in another unhappy marriage. We got divorced 1 year later.

I eventually met a wonderful woman in Indonesia whom I fell in love with and it was for real, still together after 22 years. We got legally married twice, once in Indonesia, then in the USA. My job still had me traveling around the world and I often took her with me. After two years of marriage Teti, my wife from Indonesia was pregnant with our daughter Tiara. We were in the USA at the time and decided our child would be born in the USA. Teti was in the USA on a visa that only allowed her to stay for 6 months at a time. I knew this would exceed her allowable visa time during the pregnancy, so I applied for a green card on Teti’s behalf. I read and studied and reread all the instructions for filing. I completed the multitude of forms in exact detail. Once I knew they were ready to file I again researched how that should be done. The forms made one thing very clear, “if you do not have a local INS office you need to file by mail at an address in Texas.” Greenwood SC where I was living did not have an INS office and the nearest I knew of was Atlanta 3 hours away. I packed all the documents into an overnight package and sent it to the address in Texas that INS documents said I needed to use.

Jumping forward again, I waited and waited for a response from INS. I was not too worried because it takes time and per the rules and law as long as we filed for the green card my wife was legal to overstay her visa in the USA. Our new baby Tiara was born and a few weeks later I got my package back from INS in Texas. When I opened it up, I found my documents covered in handwritten yellow sticky notes. There was only one message on all of them “this is the wrong office, please file with your local INS” which we did not have.

Our newborn daughter was healthy, and I had a scheduled trip with my company to Indonesia for work. We decided that my wife and daughter would accompany me and we would reapply for the green card when we returned to the USA.

Our visit was not long enough so when my work was completed I went ahead back to America expecting my wife and daughter to follow a few weeks later. My wife had to visit the US embassy for an update to her 5-year visa. When she did, they saw in the system that she had overstayed her previous visit to America. There was no mention of me filing for her green card, only the visa overstay. The embassy official made huge marks all over my wife’s visa page in her passport and said they would not allow her to return to the USA for 10 years. There was a question about my daughter being a US citizen and the embassy told my wife “get a divorce from your husband and we will ship the infant back to the USA.”

When my wife called me crying, I could not believe it. This was not the USA I had grown up with that was humanitarian in all aspects. We had broken no laws in actuality, but that is not what they were saying. They said she overstayed a 6-month visa and could not reapply or return to the USA for 10 years.

Over the next two years, I filed for every appeal I could find. I even had Lindsey Graham, our state representative, assisting me. The only answer I could get was my wife broke the law, and this was the consequence. It did not matter we were legally married in the USA and that I was an American-born citizen. It did not matter our infant daughter was a US citizen. The US Immigration service made a mistake, and we had to pay the piper for it.

In early 2003 my wife called crying from Indonesia saying her and my daughter’s life was in danger. Being married to an American in a majority Muslim country was difficult. Some saw that our marriage was wrong and that me being Christian as an infidel.

Eventually, this led to me going to Indonesia where I have had to stay the past 17 years. At first, it was difficult. I had to survive by building a business on the Internet. I sold my services as a web designer through my online business, Glenn Website Design. https://glennwebsitedesign.com . I also did some teaching at the local university as a native English speaker and I worked with some book companies reading their texts for recorded books. We were surviving at US standards of poverty level living.

Eventually, through promoting my business, Glenn-Furniture, I met two partners in Tulsa Oklahoma, Hoby and Bill. They bought furniture from me for 7 years until their partnership had a falling out. My furniture business continued with them for a few more years until it played out.

This leads me to where I am now trying to survive the COVID – 19 financial crisis. I continued relationships with both of my buyers/friends Hoby and Bill in Tulsa doing web design and occasional orders of furniture.

I am working with Hoby trying to sell personal protective equipment he is importing to the USA from China on his new website business I built for him Midwest PPE https://midwestppe.com/. But that venture is difficult. The normal channels for advertising like Facebook, Twitter, Google ads, LinkedIn have all banned any reference to running ads for the products he is selling. Hoby now has thousands of dollars invested in products expecting me to help get them sold and I cannot reach the buyers who would be happy to buy his products.

I also sell the occasional stained glass lamps and window panels from a dropship supplier in New York on my website at https://www.tiffanylampsforsale.com/

Times are not getting any better with the onslaught of the COVID – 19 crisis. Because of the COVID – 19 crisis, I am having a harder time finding any kind of business to keep us going. I do not know what to do. I do not have enough money to get us back to the USA if that were even an option. I cannot legally work here in Indonesia because the visa I have is for family only, no work-permit.

I received stimulus paper checks for me and my daughter at my home in Tulsa. My friend Bill could not cash the checks himself, so he mailed them to me here in Indonesia. But for more than a month, I cannot find any way to cash them. Local banks or even international banks here will not cash them. We get blocked by online check cashing services like PayPal because my IP address is in Indonesia. I have two useless paper checks and the US government is talking of sending out more. It is like a tease to have the money you desperately need just within grasp, but you cannot get it. I am not sure how this story will end. I can only hope that someone reads this might have some ideas. I am not looking for handouts and I work hard when I can find work.

Though we live in the poverty level at US standards, my wife Teti and I have been happily married now for 22 years. Tiara is 20 now and will get married to an Indonesian next month. If you are interested in more detail of my life story, as another venture to survive I wrote my biography and published it on Amazon.com, “The Path to Heaven Lies Just Beyond Hell.”

I know my story is similar in some ways to the many thousands around the world that are being affected by the COVID -19 crisis. May God be with us all and continue to pray for his help, do not give up.