Our Immigration Story

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services....

Oh we loathe you and love you.

All internationally adopting families in the United States have to apply for an immigration visa to bring their new child home. This has been the most wearisom process for us in the entire adoption.

Here is the protocol:

I-600 (application petition to bring home an orphan)

Fingerprinting invitation/background check

I-171H (approval of immigration visa)

This approval has to be in Ethiopia in order to be assigned an Embassy date, a.k.a TRAVEL DATES!!!!

The procedure began for us in the first days of February this year. We sent in our I-600 application to the immigration center in Texas. The instructions stated that we could send in our application prior to the completion of our homestudy. Post homestudy completion, a copy of the final study should also be sent to the center in Texas. So...that's what we did. Our application and our homestudy were confirmed to be in Texas as of February 4th.

We were pleasantly ignorant for a month just waiting for an invitation to be fingerprinted. Our bliss was interupted when on March 12th we received a letter stating that the office in Des Moines had our application but was missing our home study....WHAT??? We should have our fingerprinting invitation by now and your just telling us that you are missing a document?

The letter gives an email address to contact if you have any questions. I email my concern and then I waited some more. A few days and 2 unreturned emails later, I call the national hotline. The helpful people there kindly direct us to the email address I have been unsuccessfully tapping for the past 3 days. SIX days later we receive an email stating that they don't know where our home study is but it is not in the Des Moines office where it needs to be in order to receive an invitation to be fingerprinted. We secede to the black hole between Texas and Iowa and send another notarized, original copy of our homestudy to Des Moines--- which they received on March 29th. So this has put us about a month behind. The staff in Des Moines did say at that point that they would request us to have the first available fingerprinting appointment....ok some good news. However,this happened not to be until May 7th. By this point, we have passed court in Ethiopia but we have not been so successful with our own governments' paperwork trail.

Well, we realized that there is nothing we can do but trust in the God who has leveled every other mountain standing in our way during this journey.

We went for fingerprinting last Friday. The lady there said it would take at least 20 days to be processed. This actually made us feel pretty good considering the length of waiting we had already done. I then started looking at other family's blogs and saw that most of them had waited at least a couple of months before they got their approval after fingerprinting. We also received an email from our agency saying...We haven't received your I-171H approval form yet. You can't be assigned travel dates without this. Let us know as soon as you receive the form. Ok, panic started to creep in a little.

Micah and I started to pray for a miracle. After all, why would the God who has completely laid the path for us in every other aspect of us becoming a father to the fatherless forget us now?

"Does he who implanted the ear not hear? Does he who formed the eye not see?" Psalm 94:9

Micah shot another email to Des Moines at about 10 o'clock last night telling our case worker about our situation and politely inquired if there was any possible way to expedite this process. This was the response that we received this very morning:

"Your I-600A was approved today,

and the I-171H approval notice was mailed to your home address."

FIVE BUSINESS DAYS LATER WE HAVE BEEN APPROVED.

Why do we waste even an iota of time or energy into worrying when all we have to do is call on our loving and abundantly gracious God?

We now ask that God's hand would move this approval to Ethiopia quickly so that we can be assigned travel dates.

I am thinking God wants this little boy in our family fast--maybe even more than we do.