Fatou Ndiaye brought her sister to Lyon in nine months, not three years
The family-reunification chapter is thirty pages. The savings for Fatou were measured in years of her sister’s life.
Fatou had been a French resident on a Carte de séjour "vie privée et familiale" for just over four years when her sister’s husband died in a traffic accident outside Dakar. Her sister — twenty-eight years old, widowed, with two young children — had no immediate family left in Senegal. Fatou was her closest relative, and the only person in a position to offer her stability. The French regroupement familial procedure for a sibling is more restrictive than for a spouse or minor child, but it exists under specific humanitarian circumstances, and the book’s thirty-page chapter on French family reunification mapped the whole procedure.
The chapter walked Fatou through the three-tier process: the request to the OFII (Office français de l’immigration et de l’intégration) for a préavis favorable, the sister’s subsequent application to the French consulate in Dakar for a visa long séjour, and the final residence-permit application at the Lyon préfecture after arrival. Each tier had its own evidentiary expectations, and the chapter listed them in order of priority. Fatou drafted the OFII request herself from the chapter template, had a lawyer she hired for a single two-hour consultation (300 euros) review and sign off on the submission, and filed it.
The préavis favorable arrived in four months. The French consulate in Dakar issued the visa within six weeks of her sister’s application. Fatou’s sister and the two children landed at Lyon-Saint-Exupéry nine months after Fatou had read the chapter for the first time. The Lyon préfecture issued the carte de séjour three weeks after arrival.
The sister is now enrolled in a French language course at a cost-free centre run by the municipality of Lyon and is working part-time at a bakery in the sixth arrondissement where Fatou knows the owner. The two children are attending the local maternelle and école élémentaire. The family is living in Fatou’s three-room flat in Villeurbanne until the sister can afford a flat of her own, which the bakery owner believes will take her about a year.
Fatou still writes to us about once a quarter. The last email mentioned that she has started lending the book to friends in her building. We hope they will read Chapter 14. It is the one Fatou still bookmarks.
“The book’s section on family reunification saved my sister from another two years of waiting in Dakar.”
Outcome
Regroupement familial granted, Lyon, 9 months.