Immigration Update

As you probably heard, we received 2 days notice for Sarah to get to Montreal for her K3 visa interview which took place Friday morning Oct 19. Everything went really well and they said she had all her papers in order, though she doesn't recall them actually saying the words "it's approved." The way it works is they took her passport and said they would do some processing, put the visa in the passport and then mail it to her canadian address (Rebecca's address in Gatineau, near where we just moved from). They said the processing would take two days, and the shipping would take about a week. Since Gatineau is only a two hour drive from Montreal, we were hoping it would come sooner. So you can imagine how nervous we were getting as the days passed by without any word. It's already been two weeks since she left NC and we hadn't heard anything. Until this morning that is! The visa arrived in the mail this morning, and Sarah wrote me around 10:45 with the good news. We chatted online during most of my 11 o'clock class (I had my laptop with me) and I'm so excited she'll be coming home soon! She already had a ticket to fly back on the 8th, and it would cost $500 to move the date up, so we're just going to leave it and wait. Though it will have been three full weeks since she left, the last week won't be as hard because we'll have a firm end date in mind. The hardest part about the last week or so has been the fear that it wouldn't come, or that there was a problem and she would have stay longer, or even the remote possibility that it wouldn't be approved. We can put all those fears to rest now. The conditions of her visa are that once she enters the US, she can't leave or the visa is void. However, if a family tragedy occurs and she wants to go to France or Canada, she can request permission to leave and come back without losing her status. This is a huge relief and diminishes the feeling that she's trapped here away from her sisters and parents. The other conditions are that she still can't work or study. The only thing it allows her to do is live in the states indefinetly until she has the interview for a greencard, without having to leave the country every 3 months like she would with visitor status. That's the latest, thanks to everyone for your support!