A Rant - with a Happy Ending

“Please be advised that we have received your approval Cable…We are ready to process the case.”

After six months of emails and phone calls we finally received confirmation that the National Visa Center has sent our cable to the US embassy in Almaty. This very important step will allow us to get a visa stamp on our child’s Kazakh passport that will automatically make our child a US citizen when they touch down on US soil. We can finalize the adoption in country without this approval, but we cannot leave Kazakhstan.

While navigating the ever changing requirements of a foreign government has at times been difficult, the real difficulty for us has come from our own government. Due to security concerns (from babies??) all adoption visas began to be routed through the National Visa Center late last summer. This had not been true when we applied for our first I7IH for China; at that time the local USCIS office was able to send the approval cable directly to the country. While many people complain about their local USCIS office (primarily due to processing times) I do not recall anyone ever complaining that they did not do their job. Since the switch to routing through the National Visa Center, I have heard of MANY people who have had difficulty with approval cables not being sent. I even read that one family’s approval was sent to Thailand, but they are adopting from Ethiopia!

We received our 171H for Kazakhstan in December of 2007. About six weeks later we emailed the embassy in Almaty to make sure they had received everything and they notified us that they had not. So we emailed the NVC to see when the cable would be sent, but got no response. The first time we called the NVC they stated that they had no record of us adopting. So we went back to our USCIS office and asked them to resend our approval information to the NVC. Several weeks later we called the NVC again and this time they actually found our name, but only had record of our approval for China from early 2006 (why didn’t they find that information the first time we called?!) As a side note, when you call the NVC they request a case number. Adoptions do not get case numbers – only every other kind of immigration does. So once you explain that, they state that they have to pull up a different spreadsheet. So adoptions are not even in the same system as the rest of immigration, so how does it help to be routed through the NVC? Often their excuse to inquiring adoptive parents when they have no record of anything being received from the local USCIS office is that they have thousands of pieces of mail to go through. Isn’t that their job?

Luckily our local USCIS office has been very helpful and they are as frustrated as we are with these problems. So they started sending everything FedEx with tracking numbers. We got the tracking number from our USCIS office and called the NVC again. This time they again said they had no record of us, but after my wonderful husband insisted on speaking to the supervisor and stated that we had the name of the person who signed for the package, they suddenly found our information and said that the cable had been sent on June 30. So we emailed Almaty again – and today got confirmation that they had received the cable! No matter where you are adopting from, always check with embassy to ensure that they have what they need. I cannot imagine having to try to resolve this from Kazakhstan.

Again, we will be making our blog private in the near future, so if you would like an invite, please leave a comment on this or the previous post. Thanks!