Green Card

Moyz's green card has been annoying to me to say the least. It hasn't come in the 4 months since he has been home and we have had many calls to USCIS and opened up a couple of formal inquiries into the matter. None of this has helped at all, and they always say call back in 30 days if you don't hear anything. So I do, and they never know anything different.

The last time I called they suggested to make an InfoPass appt. at the closest USCIS center to my house, which happens to be about 70 miles away. We had our appt. yesterday, and I was hoping to finally put an end to all of the questions. (We did, but first I want to talk about the experience).

Anyway, Chris took off a couple hours over lunch to come with because I figured if I hauled 4 kids to an official meeting with a division of the govt. they wouldn't exactly appreciate it, so he and Owen, Truitt and Kembia stayed in the car while Moyz and I went in.

You have to go through security just like at the airport. There was one scanner for you to walk through, and one belt for you to put your stuff on and them to look at it in their little machine, but there were 6 cops available to help. It made no sense at all. Four of them just sat at the back of the room and watched the other two work. I kept beeping so I had to get wanded and which point one of the sitting 4 got up to do that. I had to put Moyz down on the floor so they could go over me and he clinged to my legs and just stared at the guy.

Then we had to go downstairs, where I kid you not, there was another cop whose job it appears, is to stand outside the door where you go in for information. I have no idea how she handles standing in one spot all day, or really what her purpose is because there are 6 cops upstairs, but I would probably shoot myself with my own gun if I had to just stand by a door all day. Meanwhile I am thinking that it appears quite excessive and a giant waste of tax payers money to have all of these people employed just standing around and doing nothing. Plus, there was another cop in a different part of the building who sat in a chair all day. No computer, book, nothing. Just sitting in a chair. I sincerely hope that their pay and benefits are good because how else you could handle a job like that all day, every day for your life? Meanwhile, most of me is thinking no wonder our country is in such huge debt, here at this one center alone they have 6 extra people we are paying for that aren't necessary...

Oh, I also forgot to say that I had a camera in my ginormous baby bag I wasn't aware of, so when they found it in the scanner I had to go back outside to put it away and stand at the back of the line to go through security again.

Anyway, I am getting side tracked. When we finally got to meet with the agent, he said that he can find no reason for Moyz not to have gotten his green card. There is nothing in the system to show any concern at all. He was going to open up yet another inquiry to try and find out what was going on. I asked if there was someone I could talk to at the Texas Center who deals with green cards, and he said no, that they do things so different that there wasn't really anyone to talk to. For real? Maybe they should let one of the 6 sitting cops go and hire someone who could help...

Right as we are leaving he asks if we are in the process of readopting. I told him that we have court soon. To which he tells me that once we readopt we don't need the green card anyway to apply for the cert. of citizenship, so in essence, we don't need the green card at all.

Why couldn't someone have told us this at the beginning? you know before we wasted countless time on the phone, driving 140 miles round trip and Chris taking time off work all for nothing? At least I had an answer to the long green card saga, but it did little to bolster my confidence in our govt. More things have been botched in our paperwork with the govt. then I care to admit. If you are in the middle of an adoption, or even considering it, make sure you follow your paper trail and know how things are going at all times. One full year after we switched from Ethiopia to DRC, the visa center still had us registered as adopting from Ethiopia, we were trying to set an embassy date in Kinshasa, and they said they didn't have any Nelson's adopting from DRC with our name. even though I was holding in my hand while on the phone with them the confirmation that showed us switching countries over a year ago. This took a LONG time to straighten out, and we wasted several weeks with this. Then the embassy said our fingerprints had expired, they had but we had also renewed them like a month prior to this.

I guess the good news is, is that our kids are home and doing well. And it is amazing how quickly you forget all of the things that caused pain or were problems, and this is definitely a good thing! Still, I am not sure how families can do the whole adoption process again and again, one time for us was enough stress to last us a million lifetimes!