Visa Application

Joel and I had an appointment today at our local USCIS (immigration) office in Memphis. We submitted Seth's visa application. We received his legal documents Friday from Holt. They were really neat and special to me b/c they had his mother's signature on there. I think about her and how she must have felt signing the papers. The USCIS is very formal and official. We had to make an appointment to get in the door. They run your things through a scanning machine and you also walk through a metal detector. We could not bring in our phones. The good part was that there was no waiting. I brought my adoption folder which is about 5 inches thick. She asked for our 1-600A approval and our birth certificates & marriage license. Thank goodness I came prepared. It takes about 8 weeks to get an approval. I never thought about this before but the US doesn't let just anyone in the country. You can't just go to another country and bring a child back. They first want to make sure that you are financially able to provide for a child and that you are not a criminal. Secondly, the US wants to make sure that your child is actually an orphan. The US says that our idea of poverty is not the same definition in other parts of the world. When we get approval they will send his approval letter the the visa processing center and then have them cable it to the US Embassy in Thailand. We will pick it up when we travel to get Seth.