Visas and USCIS approval

I just read my last post and it sounds like I promised more interesting posts but never delivered. Well, this one might not be super interesting either!

In the past 2 weeks we are still making slow progress. We are truly now at a point of waiting because it was finally confirmed by our agency that we will not be traveling until mid-January at the earliest. We are now hoping that they will be able to give us our exact dates of travel before the end of the year, but we will have to wait on that because we found out that the Ministry of Education is on vacation. Yes, a 3 week vacation. Only a few weeks before they will then have a 2 week vacation. Now we don't know, but the MOE could consist of just 1 person. And in this country, if the person who does a particular job is on vacation or out on sick leave, well nobody else does their job. Everything just stops. Yes, very different than the good ole USA where the idea of the country shutting down for even a week for a vacation would bring shock and horror to everyone.

But, anyway we think that is really why we're not traveling. We were told something about quotas and what not but I'm starting to think otherwise. It doesn't really matter, the end result is the same. I'm trying to keep some perspective about this whole situation. Even with delays here and there, this adoption from start to finish will likely take no longer than 12 months. That's really not that long. We have dear friends adopting from a particular Asian country and they've been waiting for over 4 years now. They finally have a referral for a child, but they're now waiting to pick up their son, and they've been waiting for that since May.

Being the independent person and traveler than I am, I starting looking into getting our visas for our eventual travel to Eastern Europe. Recently the US and this country signed an agreement (they've been doing a lot of that lately) to make it easier for Americans to visit their country. It was like a gesture of good will or something. Well, I suppose it's easier once you get the visa, but getting the visa isn't much easier. With the new agreement, Americans are now allowed to get a 3 year tourist visa. These will be the one's we are going to attempt to get. It will save us a good amount of money if we have to make 3 trips and it will probably still save us money and hassle if we only have to make 2. Though we could make the trip to the consulate in S.F. ourselves, we're going to pay a little extra to have a visa company do it for us. We would have to make at least 2 trips to the consulate and you can only go at certain times and well I don't want to deal with all that. I was thinking of posting a picture of a visa from that country to make this post more interesting, but then I realized that I would be revealing the country, so no picture!

And we finally finished our online education. I'm actually really glad we had to take it. I feel much better prepared for the potential challenges of parenting an adopted child. There truly are differences that need to be taken into consideration that are different than parenting a biological child. I might write a post about that and include the link to a great book I read on the topic. We are now taking some free foster parenting classes through a local community college. Hopefully, we can use these hours for our required 30 hours of face-to-face training. These classes are making me think that if we choose to adopt again, it will likely be through our foster care system. You just never know where life will take you, and what will lead you there!

And one last thing, we have USCIS approval! So, we are approved to bring an orphan into the US. When we got the notice from USCIS, I realized that my middle name was spelled wrong. It sort of took some of the excitement away because I knew that it needed to be fixed. But, I sent an email to them, and they replied on a Saturday to tell me they would fix it. I was very impressed with the USCIS's prompt service!