We got an updated preliminary approval form from CIS (Citizen’s and Immigration Service) this week. It shows that we’re adopting from Vietnam and, hopefully, that will satisfy all government agencies that need to review these sorts of documents.
Our situation has been complicated by the fact that we won’t be returning immediately to the US with Alyssa from Vietnam. Instead, we will be coming back to Turkey. This means that we won’t apply for her immigrant visa in Vietnam, but in Turkey. The good news is that the consular officer in Turkey tells that she has all of the necessary approvals to process the visa for Alyssa. The consular officer is also working with the Turkish authorities to determine what type of visa we will need to get to bring Alyssa to Turkey from Vietnam. At that point, she won’t be a US citizen and will need to get a different visa than the rest of us. The consular officer assures us this won’t be a problem. It’s really great to have such competent people working hard to help make this adoption as easy as possible.
Looks like the final document is in place for our dossier. We had to re-submit our medical clearance. The Vietnamese government changed the form from one that was in Vietnamese and English to one that was only in English. Seems odd, doesn’t it?
Anyway we finished the new form and fedexed it back to the Adoption Center of Washington. They’ve received the forms and also have our dossier back from the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington. So, it is ready to be sent to Vietnam! Should happen this week.
We’re also working on getting a new pre-approval letter from the US government that shows we’re living in Turkey. But, that won’t hold up the dossier so it can come later.
It looks like we’re entering the final stages of the paperwork drill. Our dossier was complete, but because we moved to Ankara, we needed to update the approval that we had from Citizens and Immigration Services (CIS), the US government agency that provides approval for visas for orphans. Also, when we got our approval we thought we would probably adopting from China. So, we needed to change our home address and the country of adoption.
That turns out to be a two step process. First, we need to change the country of adoption by submitting a form to CIS in Baltimore, the original office who gave us the permission. Amazingly, that only took about a week and we now have that paperwork updated. Now, we need to change our home address, which will be done by the regional CIS office in Athens. We’re working on that right now, but have everything lined up so it shouldn’t take too long.
Basically, we needed to have an updated home study done by a licensed social worker, which we did. We will submit that to the Athens office and we should be all set with the proper permissions from the USG to move forward with the adoption. Now we are just waiting for the Vietnamese government to finish the licensing of US adoption agencies - another whole story.
We’re in the final stages of getting all of our paperwork ready for our Vietnam dossier. If you look in the background section, you’ll see that we have already prepared a dossier for this adoption, but that was in case we were going to have to adopt from China. So, it wasn’t too hard to get all of the paper put together for this dossier. We had already gotten all of the ‘hard’ documents (birth certificates, marriage certificate, etc) and really only had to update some of the other documents that were unique to Vietnam. We also had to have our home study updated because we had moved since we had received our preliminary approval from the Citizens and Immigration Service (CIS) - an agency of the Department of Homeland Security. Everyone who does an international adoption gets to know CIS and its procedures very well!
The other slightly complicating factor was getting many of the documents notarized. Because we’re now living in Ankara, Turkey, it’s not as easy as if we were in the US. But, of course, we got great service from the Consular Section at the US Embassy.
Another interesting twist was updating police background checks. Of course, these have to be done by the local police and be in a language that the Vietnamese authorities will understand. Again, the embassy provided super service. This time the Regional Security Office was able to coordinate with the Turkish National Police to confirm that neither Nancy nor I had any record of criminal activities in Ankara, Turkey.
So, after all of the that was done and we took pictures of our new house to be included in the dossier, we fedexed everything back to our adoption agency. The final dossier should be on it way to Vietnam soon. Will keep you updated.