Visas

Visa is the word that has defined the post-China approval stage of the adoption process.  As soon as we received our Letters of Acceptance (LOA) from China, we mailed in our I-800 application to the USCIS.  The I-800 is needed to finalize the immigration process for Kiera and Matteo.  They will fly to the United States on their Chinese passports with American visas and automatically become American citizens when they land on U.S. soil.

Here's where the simple concept of "applying for a visa" gets kind of ridiculous.  I sent the I-800 application by overnight mail to a "lockbox" in Lewisville, Texas.  If I had sent it by regular mail, it needed to go to the elusive "lockbox" in Dallas, Texas.  I still haven't figured out what this "lockbox" is.  I think it might be a black hole.

From there, the application took the standard two weeks to travel by mule-drawn cart to Lee's Summit, Missouri, where it is assigned to a USCIS officer for review.  Do not ask me why we couldn't just mail our applications directly to Missouri, because at this stage in the process, I'm terrified of making a wrong move and halting the entire adoption, so I stopped asking reasonable questions.

Once our officer approved our applications, she sent them by "two-day" mail, which was really five-or-six-day mail to the National Visa Center (NVC) in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  Day six of our application's journey was Thanksgiving, so that pushed us back yet another day.  I had already been stalking the NVC since Monday hoping to get something called a "GUZ" number.  Pretty sexy sounding, right?  Like much of this process, I do not even know what a "GUZ" number is, but I do know I need it to fill out the DS-260, which is the immigrant application through the State Department.  I filled the DS-260 on behalf of Kiera and Matt and swore to the U.S. government that my two-year-olds do not intend to engage in polygamy, are not members of the Communist party and are not terrorists, just to name a few.

After calling the NVC repeatedly before I could get something other than a busy signal and then spending 30 minutes on hold before reaching a human being, I finally had my GUZ# in hand and immediately logged into the DS-260 application.  That's where I saw they had entered my name as K-R-I-S-T-E-N.  While waiting on hold again (for 50 minutes) with the NVC, I entertained myself by ranting on Facebook and commiserating with my two fellow K-I-R-S-T-E-N friends.

This past Monday I hounded politely e-mailed the NVC requesting a pdf of the cable they send to the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou, China alerting them that our applications have been forwarded.  In the age of electronic correspondence, I wasn't going to wait around for the paper copy of the cable to come in the mail.  Once my agency had the pdf of the cable and a copy of our DS-260, they sent an envelope of paperwork by overnight mail to our agency's in-country rep.  He or she will hand-deliver Kiera and Matt's applications to the consulate.  Deliveries of visa applications are only permitted on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, so we hope that as I type this, all the proper paperwork is sitting on a consular official's desk.  They take exactly two weeks to issue what is called an Article 5 letter, which certifies that Kiera and Matt meet the qualifications for an immigrant visa.  We hope to get their Article 5 letters on December 18.  That completes their visa process.  Whew!

Chris and I still need to apply for our visas from the Chinese government.  We are also waiting on travel approval from China, who won't issue that until we have our Article 5.  Once we have travel approval, we can request our consulate appointment, which will be the final step in the adoption process.  And once we have our consulate appointment, we can book our flights to China!

Because much of these final steps follow a predictable timeline, our agency is preparing for us to leave on January 22.  Kiera and Matteo, just six more weeks!