Travel rules force new mum to choose between seeing dying parent or baby’s dad – World News

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Sirli Kellian is considering leaving Australia for good due to being stranded for months on end in Estonia, with no affordable way to get back to the country of her daughter’s birth until next year

A new mum and her baby are stuck thousands of miles away from home after they rushed to a dying family member’s bedside.

Sirli Kellian and her young daughter Rubi are two of 38,000 Australians queuing up to get back into the country amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The 31-year-old is currently in Estonia where she jetted out in April to visit her dying mum Piret, who has terminal stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

Sirli has had to leave her husband Isaac behind at their home outside of Perth out of fear she’d miss the chance to say a final goodbye to her dying son.

Five months on and the mum and her one-year-old’s chances of getting back this year into Australia, which recently cut returning passenger numbers in half to 3,070 a week, are slim.

The toll of separation on the family has been so great that Isaac has taken time off work due to his mental health and the couple are now looking into moving to the country of his birth, New Zealand.

“My partner is saying he is okay but when he found out we can’t get back and the next available flight we can swap to is maybe in January, he had to take a week off work for mental health leave,” Sirli told the Mirror.

“My daughter doesn’t quite understand the concept yet. We facetime every day with Isaac. It is very hard.

“I am glad I went, but every day I wonder if I made a mistake. The only silver lining stopping me from having a complete mental breakdown is being here with my parents.”

Sirli, who is originally from Estonia but now has Australian citizenship, met Isaac while backpacking Down Under nine years ago.

They had planned to introduce their baby to the European wing of the family when she turned one, but then the pandemic hit.

Australia took a very proactive approach to controlling the virus, tightly controlling borders and requiring incoming travellers to quarantine for up to two weeks in hotels at their expense.

While Sirli was aware of the difficulties and cost of leaving and then re-entering the country, she realised she’d have to act when her mum fell ill in December 2020.

“It took three months but then she got diagnosed with stage three pancreatic cancer,” she said.

“From then it was at the back of our minds, what would we do if anything happened? Would I go or not?

“Around April we decided we didn’t know how long the pandemic will last.

“The decision was the hardest one we have ever had to make. To voluntarily break up a young family without knowing when we will be reunited.

“But we had hope. We had hope that the Australian government would look after us and let us back to our home when the time comes.”

After applying for a travel exemption that required her to explain how badly impacted her mental health had been by the absence, Sirli left for Eastern Europe.

As soon as she could, she put herself forward to get two Pfizer jabs, in the hope it would ease her return to Australia.

“But in the meantime, the incoming passenger cap was again halved and two weeks before we were to return home on the 12th of August 2021, our flight to Perth was cancelled,” she continued.

“To be precise, our flight was not cancelled but myself and my 1-year-old daughter were bumped off the flight.

“All the Australian Embassy in Sweden could tell me was that it was too bad to hear about my situation but there was nothing they could do.”

Sirli is grateful that she’s been able to spend time with her mum, who is receiving palliative care.

However, she is very conscious of being a financial burden on her family, who had not prepared to look after the now out-of-work restaurant manager for many months.

The only way Sirli and her daughter can get home before February next year, when the next economy flight is up for grabs, is by paying £8,000 for a business class flight.

“I did not have the money to come here in the first place, let alone to afford the quarantine on return,” she said.

“But we made it work. We scraped every cent we had to make this happen so I could see my sick mother for one last time.

“We had to already access our supers (pension funds) last year to survive. My husband keeps working long hours in Australia, paying taxes, to make sure we have food on the table and bills paid at the home that is waiting for us to return.”

Sirli says she feels intense pressure from Australians not to return and feels like they do not understand why she left during the pandemic.

She said: “I can’t see how this is fair. Me and my husband are both citizens. Do we want to continue our lives in Australia if this keeps on going?

“My husband is from New Zealand. New Zealand would be quite supportive of our situation. They want to bring their people home.

“Do we want to stay in Australia if this is how life is? We just feel like no one cares.”