The Wedding - Get Mrs Claus home for Christmas

UPDATE - Thanks to your wonderful generosity, they were able to tie the knot in the Netherlands on 10/11/20 but that is just the first hurdle! Now Sarah needs a spousal visa to be able to come home, which is why your continued support is so important!

Dear helpers,
two friends of mine (Sarah and Adam) are trying to get married. They are engaged about 10 years and they moved to england (his home). They rebuild their flat and there's still a lot of work to do. At christmas 2018 the mess began, they visited friends in netherlands and germany and after that they wanted to marry. Then after the journey they didn't let her in (she has an US passport). She got seperated of her child that lived with Adam since that day in england. She lives in the netherlands since that day and we tried a lot to get them together since that day. The brexit makes it difficult too and we don't know what to do.

For those who are interested in the full story, i asked them to write it down for me and they did it. At the bottom i have inserted the story.

By the way sorry for my bad english, i try to tell you what happened in my words and i hope you all understand what i'm saying.
The whole thing has already caused so many problems and costs for them and they have been going through hell for the last two years.
The Covid-19 crisis has not made things easier for them

Now why i do the fundraiser? The plan is that we bring Adam to the netherlands and they marry there. Due too corona this is difficult because he has to close his shop and he has to pay the people there. So i try to get the money that he can pay his workers and still can go to the netherlands to marry her. The money goes directly to Adam and Sarah.

We need you to make it happen!

For everyone who helps, i would be so thankful from the bottom of my heart!

I really hope we can make it possible.

Thank you so much
Sascha

*** UPDATE *** I asked them to write the story for you all and they did it:

Hello, we are Adam and Sarah. We are a creative, cosplay loving, Christmas loving, Universe loving couple. We love to see others succeed in their endeavours and we strive to help where we can. We adore each other so much and have been through so much together in the last 10 years. Back and forth between England and the Netherlands, our long distance relationship, has flourished and bloomed and we love each other more each day and want to finally be able to be together in our home in England. Even with everything that has been thrown at us over the past 2 years we are still fighting to be together.

We first met because of the Elf Fantasy Fair Haarzuilens in the Netherlands in 2009. Adam was there with his author friend Raven Dane and I was there with friends having a good day out with friends and my youngest daughter. We didn't meet at that fair itself but later on Facebook when we both posted our pictures and comments in English. We became Facebook friends.

We later realized that we had feelings for each other and wanted to move forward into the future together. Due to me having small children with my ex-husband, it wasn't possible to immediately up and move us to England.

So for 8 years we went back and forth, keeping our love alive and being in constant contact thanks to Skype and Whatsapp. For those 8 years me and my daughters travelled to England to explore and make friends there, and Adam came to the Netherlands to be with us.

Finally in 2018 we were able to make the move to England. My youngest daughter was going to go to school there and Adam had bought us a home to make our own. It is an older building, main part built more than 100 years ago and was originally a butchers. In the house is a shop and that is where Sarah is to run her creative business from, selling her creations and offering the opportunity to other creatives from the area to offer their creations on commission. Along with hopefully getting together groups to have craft days together and make it a community place again.

We had so much to do and arrange. We finally made the move at the end of August 2018, we moved everything, being taken advantage of by a moving company who miscalculated the amount of stuff that needed moving costing us almost 5,000 pounds, instead of the 3,000 they had quoted, and costing us to complete the move more than a week later.

Once we finally got home to England there was much to do in the house, it needed full electrical rewiring as the previous owners had lied about having kept everything up to date. Some of the wiring had been there since before 1950. To get this done took almost a month, in the mean time we found so many problems with the flooring, with the boiler, the heating. But needed to make the house part viable for habitation with new electrics, and then move all the stuff out of the garage and shop area to get them rewired so that finally all the plans would be a go.

After being in England for 2.5 months, Adam and Sarah decided to take a small week vacation back to the Netherlands to pick up the rest of Sarah's things that had been left and to see friends and to see the arrival of Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas) in the Netherlands.

After a fun filled week with friend in the Netherlands and in Germany (Sascha and his family being part of it) we headed back to England.
This is where the problems started. The customs officer at the port, wouldn't let Sarah through to England. Because she told the truth that she wanted to go to England to stay. Yes, we know, we should have had her Visa sorted out before hand, but that is hindsight 20/20. As an American she could legally stay there 6 months without problems, but this man just would not let her through. He even wrote some number in her passport and told her to not even try to fly there or go to another Port as she would be detained and denied ever entering England again.

In the middle of the night, we called in panic to our friends Dirk and Sonja Plug if they could come get Sarah in Belgium, because Adam needed to get back to England to be there for Sarah's youngest daughter we was at home for the week alone as she was in school. Adam from back towards the Netherlands, and Dirk and Sonja drove to Belgium, where they took Sarah back to the Netherlands and their home.

It was heart wrenching for everyone, after just 2.5 months being pulled apart because this one guy. So Sarah applied for a Fiance Visa after 2 months on waiting for this to happen, it was denied, taking in the process over 2500 pounds, because even though Adam had been seperated for 12 years by then, his divorce had never been finalized on paper. So Sarah was stuck, in the Netherlands with only a weeks worth of clothing, in the middle of winter. Luckily with wonderful friends who let them stay with her.

Everything seemed to take so much longer, the divorce was supposed to take 6-9 months, it took 20 months to get finalized, costing also more than 1000 pounds due to having to hire people to find the ex-wife and then to pay for the courts to send bailiffs to hand deliver the divorce papers. In January 2019 Sarah asked the UK VIsa office for a visitors visa to be able to go to England for a 3 week visit for her birthday, because her daughter had bought tickets to go see The Script and it happened to fall on Sarah's birthday. UK Visa denied Sarah this visa and took another 1000 pounds without chance of fighting it.

Sarah is still stuck in the Netherlands, the last time that Sarah and Adam have been physically together was for his week visit at Christmas 2019. So they haven't been able to hold each other to touch each other in all this time and in 10 years of knowing each other this is the longest that they have been physically seperated.

Because things were taking so long, Sarah had to find another place to live, the arrangement with DIrk and Sonja had been meant to be for a few weeks, maybe a few months, but it was over a year and they really needed their privacy back and their home to be just theirs again. This was completely understandable as it had never been the plan.

Now she is renting a room in a small apartment, which was meant to be her and one other younger female. But is now inhabited by the younger female, her husband and his cousin (they came from Spain just after the borders opened in June) as well as Sarah. She pays about half of her paycheck each month in rent for a 3x4meter room, use of kitchen, bathroom and laundry (one day a week) with no visitors allowed, outside of her daughters and Adam and them only after agreement from the housemates, though the housemates regularly bring unknown people into the house without giving Sarah any heads up at all.

August 4, 2020 Adam finally received his divorce papers, Sarah started contacting the city councils in the Netherlands to see if they could arrange a wedding ceremony in the Netherlands and a week later England put the Netherlands on the quarantine list, meaning that if Adam came to the Netherlands he would have to quarantine when he went back to England for 14 days.

As Adam is the sole owner and manager of the one and only dedicated Robin Hood attraction in Nottingham, The Robin Hood Experience, he would have to close his business for his 2 weeks of quarantine or hire people in to cover the two weeks in which he has to quarantine. And since they had to be closed since the corona virus mess has been happening until July they have missed out on months of income and he cannot afford to cover the costs of hiring in people for 14 days or to close the Experience.

So now we are still seperated and can't move forward, all the while wasting more money on rent and things in the Netherlands that could be going towards rebuilding the house, the business and moving forward finally together.