>>...VPNs are blocked, though that’s a constant battle between oppressive governments and VPN providers...
If I might 'nerd out' for a moment here... One VPN protocol, Open VPN uses either UDP port 1194 or TCP 443. I can see how 1194 might be blocked at the interchange level, but 443 - which is also used for SSL (pages starting with https://) not so much. On top of that, OpenVPN has an 'obfuscation' feature, making it appear to be HTTPS encrypted rather than VPN traffic.
Assuming you've been using OpenVPN over 443, whoever's blocking is either tracking all the IP addresses commercial VPN providers are using for inbound connections - or the blocker has super-sophisticated 'deep packet inspection' gear that can recognize an obfuscated OpenVPN over port 443. I would guess the former as the latter is quite expensive to run and can potentially slow down all 443 traffic. The simplest thing would be for them to use their DNS servers to convert the symbolic names for those VPN providers into IPs that they (the blocker) has control over. The work around there is either to use a DNS server you trust (possible to set up on an Android phone, dunno about iOS) or use the IP address directly.
If they *are* tracking VPN-provider IP addresses and blocking them at the interchange level, maybe put out an 'ask' for technical individuals to set up OpenVPN on their own boxes, send the info to you. OpenVPN's pretty straightforward if you're using somthing like pfSense for a firewall - the hard part is having a symbolic name that points to your probably-not-static IP address. That's sorted via something called Dynamic DNS - which is included for free with pretty much every name-service provider (e.g. NameCheap).
Given your background, I'd expect you'd know most or all of this already...