Seven Years to Friday

By Eric Spruill 

The Last Rep

On Friday morning, Ana Rose will raise her right hand and become an American citizen.

One sentence.

Seven years behind it.

Seven years of forms, fees, interviews, delays, extensions, notices and waiting. Seven years of doing everything the right way while still wondering, somewhere in the back of her mind, if something could go wrong.

For those born here, maybe the closest comparison is waiting on a job background check.

You know your history is clean. You know you have done nothing wrong. But after enough silence, your mind starts working against you.

Did they find something? Did I miss something? Is there something I forgot?

For Ana, that feeling was attached to something much bigger than a job.

It was attached to her home.

The current political climate didn’t help matters. Ana knew she was here legally. She knew she had followed the process. She knew she had done everything the right way.

But fear does not always listen to facts.

There was still that lingering thought.

What if something goes wrong?

That, she said, was one of the hardest parts of the process. Not just the paperwork. Not just the money. Not just the waiting.

It was the uncertainty.

The way a letter or notice could arrive and her first thought would be, What did I do wrong?

Even when she had done nothing wrong.

“You know you didn’t do anything wrong,” she said. “But in the back of your mind, you start wondering if maybe you did.”

Ana’s American story did not start with a citizenship ceremony.

In a way, it started in the water.

Ana is from Cartagena, Colombia, a historic city on the Caribbean coast. She had been a swimmer her entire life and later worked as a swim coach at an international school in Panama, where she coached children from all over the world.

Swimming was not just something she did.

It was something she believed in.

To Ana, everyone needs to learn how to swim — even if they never become competitive swimmers. It is safety. It is confidence. It is freedom.

That belief helped bring her to the Shawnee Family YMCA.

Ana had a cousin living in Oklahoma, and her cousin’s daughter was swimming for the YMCA swim team. During one of Ana’s visits, she became connected to the Y and completed her lifeguard certification here. Before she left, she asked if she could return the next summer and volunteer as a swim instructor.

She had no idea that while she was making plans to come back to the pool, her life was about to change across the street.

At her cousin’s daughter’s birthday party, Ana met Brian.

At first, he was simply the one person in the room she did not know. They became friends during that visit, then kept talking after Ana returned home. When she came back the next summer, the friendship became something more.

By New Year’s, Brian had proposed.

Love may have brought Ana to Oklahoma.

Paperwork would decide how long she could stay.

The fiancé visa came first. Then marriage. Then temporary residency. Then employment authorization. Then permanent residency. Then citizenship.

Ana began the process in 2019. By Thanksgiving of that year, she had moved to Oklahoma. She and Brian were married in December.

Then the world shut down.

The COVID-19 pandemic delayed almost everything, but in one strange way, it also gave Ana time. The YMCA was closed for months, and Ana could not work yet anyway. At that point, she was waiting on employment authorization and the documents that would allow her to begin building her life here in a more official way.

Eventually, the authorization came.

In August 2020, Ana started at the Shawnee Family YMCA as a lifeguard.

About a month later, she became head guard.

By the end of that year, she was asked to step into the aquatics director role.

She has been there ever since.

That is the part of the story that matters.

While Ana was waiting on the process, she was not waiting on her life.

She was working.

She was serving.

She was teaching children to swim, managing staff, helping families, keeping the pool running and becoming part of the fabric of the Y.

To members, parents and children, she was not paperwork.

She was Ana.

But behind the scenes, the process continued.

And continued.

And continued.

Ana said the immigration process is not user-friendly. She was able to handle much of it herself because she speaks English well, understood the forms and had access to the documents she needed. Even then, it was difficult.

And expensive.

Every form had a fee. Every step required documentation. Every delay meant more waiting.

By her estimate, she has spent around $10,000 on paperwork alone.

For others, she knows it can be even harder. Some need attorneys. Some need interpreters. Some struggle to understand the forms. Some simply need time to save the money required for the next step.

Ana knows she was fortunate in many ways.

That did not make it easy.

The process stretched longer than expected. At one point, she received extensions because the system was so backed up. Those extensions protected her legal status, but they also served as reminders that the finish line kept moving.

There was always another document.

Another notice.

Another date.

Another period of silence where she could not ask questions yet, even if the deadline she had been given had already passed.

That silence had a way of getting loud.

And the fear did not stay neatly inside the paperwork.

It followed her into airports.

Ana went home to Colombia twice in one year — once in June for her father’s funeral, and later in December for her brother’s wedding and the family’s first Christmas without her dad.

Those were not vacations.

They were family.

They were grief and love and trying to be present when the people she loved needed her.

But returning to the United States with a Colombian passport carried its own weight.

Colombia’s history with drug trafficking, Pablo Escobar and the cartels has created a stigma Ana said still follows Colombians when they travel. Go back once, and it may be routine. Go back twice in a year, she said, and the questions feel different.

The looks feel different.

The passport feels different.

Suddenly, a trip home for a funeral or a wedding can feel like something that has to be defended.

On one return trip, Ana was sent to secondary inspection.

She had done nothing wrong. She had legal residency. Her permanent residency card was waiting for her at home.

Still, she sat in that room and felt the weight of the moment.

People in that room, she said, all seemed to be carrying the same fear.

Are they going to send me back?

That is a hard thing to carry while trying to build a normal life.

But Ana kept building one.

She built it at home with Brian.

She built it at the Y.

She built it in Shawnee.

She built it every day she showed up to work and did what needed to be done.

Ana is clear about one thing: becoming an American citizen does not make her less Colombian.

She loves Colombia.

She loves its culture, its history, its music, its food and the city of Cartagena, where she was born. That will always be part of her.

But she also believes that when someone chooses to make a new country home, there is a responsibility that comes with it.

Learn the language.

Embrace the culture.

Become part of the place.

Don’t just live there.

Belong there.

For Ana, citizenship is not about replacing one identity with another.

It is about adding to who she already is.

She will always be Colombian.

On Friday, she becomes American, too.

And to Ana, that means peace.

It means relief.

It means the end of a process that has hung over her life for seven years.

It means the ability to vote and have a voice in the country she now calls home.

It means an American passport, which she admits will make travel easier.

But more than anything, it means the long wait is finally over.

Friday will not erase the seven years.

It will not erase the fear, the delays, the airport questions, the notices, the fees or the moments when silence made her wonder if something had gone wrong.

But it will give those seven years an ending.

At the Y, Ana has spent years helping others feel safe in the water.

On Friday, she finally gets to come up for air.