You may have noticed that I haven’t had any posts for last few days.  It’s not because things aren’t happening in Ukraine; things are happening every day.  However, in light of Mariupol staying relatively calm, my posts would likely have been more like rants than the measured and factual information that I try to pass along.

As I say, Mariupol has been relatively calm. People are still quite tense, but I can understand how having a foreign army some twenty miles away from one’s home might make a person jumpy.  Adding to the unease is people’s wariness about the upcoming winter.  It was already expected to be quite cold, and now there is the expectation that people may not be able to heat their homes sufficiently.  I’ve been sending some money to my wife for a while (as it turns out, I’ve been about doubling her salary), but now the banks are making it difficult to withdraw money — when they have it — so she might not be able to collect what I have sent her for this month.  In short, living in Mariupol is not that easy these days.

The sooner my wife can come to the US, the better, but such things are not only up to us.  When I first submitted my wife’s immigration paperwork, the USCIS was taking almost 10 months to process petitions.; the target time for such things was 5 months.  In the end, it took 7 months, so it seems that USCIS was really making progress.  However, the next step in the process is the National Visa Center, and all those backlogged petitions were sent like a flood to the NVC.

I got word last week that all the information for my wife’s visa has been received, but because of the large number of petitions they currently have, they expect it to be at least 60 days until their processing/review is complete.  I’m hoping they are wrong; I hope it’s more like the USCIS estimate, and things will move on to the embassy (which does the interview and approves the visa) far quicker than expected.

I had really been hoping that my wife and I would be celebrating Thanksgiving in the US this year, followed by our wedding anniversary a couple days later.  However, if we’re looking at a 60-day time frame, then the embassy wouldn’t have the petition until the beginning of November, which means our first holiday together would probably be Christmas instead.

I guess we just keep our fingers crossed; there’s really nothing more to be done at the moment.  Given that it took the NVC over three weeks to respond to an email I had sent them, we might very well be in for that 60 day wait.  (In contrast, I sent an email to the embassy in Kiev, and got an answer two days later.)