SEF Meeting

Canceled ... Nâo Faz Mal

Yesterday was my scheduled SEF meeting. Today was Denise’s. SEF is the immigration and border control agency for Portugal. During your SEF meeting, if all goes as planned, you are granted Temporary Residency status. This meeting should occur before one’s visa (for us that was a 4-month D7 visa) expires. Our visas expire in a few days. Both of our meetings have been canceled.

Why?

We got a call from Nilse, our contact at Relocate to Portugal, in late February. She told us that all SEF meetings were being suspended due to Covid restrictions. She wanted to make sure we had registered on the SEF site so we would be kept informed. She directed us to the English version of the SEF site and within a few minutes, Denise and I were registered. At that time, it showed that our appointments were still scheduled as planned.

With the hope that this would continue to be the case, I reviewed what we would each need to bring to the meeting:

• Passport

• NIF certificate (not just the number)

• Proof of accommodation for 12 months or more, registered with Finanças

• Proof of means of subsistence

  • Last 3 months of Portuguese bank statements;

  • Last 3 months of US Pension/Social Security/other income

• Proof of Health Insurance

• Completed SEF form

Hope

I continued to hope. I checked the SEF website about once a week, and it continued to show the meetings were scheduled. I created a folder on my laptop and started placing the necessary forms into it. I figured I would wait to print them until a day or two in advance. With a week to go, I texted Nilse telling her that they were still appearing to be scheduled. She assured me this was not the case and that I might not be notified until a day or two in advance. Within one hour I had the official email. The meeting was canceled and I would be informed when it was rescheduled. A few hours later, Denise got the same email.

Concern?

“Não faz mal” … when we lived in the States, Denise hated when I responded to a situation by saying, “No worries.” So one of the first Portuguese expressions I learned was its equivalent, “Não faz mal”. If you are a regular reader you know that Portugal is allowing people like us, that are waiting for approval of our Temporary Residency status, to be included in the population to be vaccinated. So delaying our SEF meeting should not delay our ability to get the coronavirus vaccine.

We also learned that we are considered “legal” until at least 31 December 2021:

Please remember that, according to Decree Law n.º 22-A/2021, of 17 March, visas and permits concerning the stay of foreign nationals in the national territory which have expired after 24th February, 2020 are accepted, under the same conditions, until 31st December, 2021.

And so we wait. Yesterday, as we walked along the coast I commented to Denise how much I loved living by the ocean. The only other time I lived in an ocean community was when I was working on the Atlantic City boardwalk … my summer job when I was a college student. To paraphrase a famous quote, it seems much is wasted on the young. I didn’t fully appreciate many things then … but I do now.