LICHFIELD’S latest St Chad’s Volunteer, Nicole Pua Ming Huil, from West Malaysia, is set to join the ministry team in the Wrockwardine Deanery in September – despite her application for a visa being turned down.

A talented musician and music teacher, Nicole (28), who is blind, has worked for several years as a tutor in St Nicholas’ Institute in Penang. She is fluent in several languages including Braille, and has secretarial and computer skills.

‘At the end of last year she started to explore what more God might be asking of her,’ said Michael Sheard, who retired as diocesan world mission officer in May. ‘Through her own diocese she applied and was accepted for the St Chad’s Volunteer programme.’

Although the Lichfield Diocese had obtained visas for 12 young Malaysians as St Chad’s volunteers during the period 2000 to 2008, new, more stringent, immigration regulations came into force last October.

‘The diocese was granted ‘category A’ status for long-term or temporary (volunteer) religious workers, and carefully following the new guidelines, applied for a licence for Nicole. But when she took this to the British High Commission in Kuala Lumpur, along with all the appropriate supporting documents, her application was turned down.

‘Phone calls and emails to the Border Agency here in the UK caused us more confusion, because they confirmed that we had acted within the regulations. At times it seemed as if the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing.

‘So we appealed – that is, Nicole requested an ‘administrative review’ of her case and, two weeks after the Commission’s own deadline had passed, we heard that her appeal had been successful.

‘It has been a trying time for all of us, but most of all for Nicole herself, who has waited graciously and cheerfully,’ Michael concluded.

Nicole will be commissioned in Lichfield Cathedral at Evensong (5.30pm) on Friday, 18 September.