Hi all,

My fiance asked me if there was any way, after we're settled stateside, that her Mom could come for an extended visit (whenever we get around to having a child), and maybe even to live if she's willing (I highly doubt it)...

Anyway, I told her that the likelihood of her mom getting a visa was pretty much impossible. She owns a tiny flat worth only 400,000 roubles, and has a shitty job, no husband, and no real ties beyond her son (my fiance's older brother - who we'd also like to visit some day). But, in spite of my telling her that, she wanted me to ask you all for your opinions, experiences, and/or advice...

So here I am asking you all this: Is there any way to get Mom and Brother into the US for visits? If it can be done before Ira finishes going through the 10-year citizenship process (if she decides to go through it), so much the better...

Thanks in advance for your thoughts,

Z

Actually this is not an impossibility.

Example from another site: http://candleforlove.com/forums/index.php?...ost&p=94823

The site seems to be erring out (at the URI you mentioned, at the forum root, and at the registration page), so I can't see it.

Is anybody else having trouble with it?

Z

Well, it really depends on your definition of "extended" visit and/or your willingness and abilities to sponsor all these people.

OK I will post what the link had: (Ignore the Chinese parts, but it should give you ideas about how to do this)

Well, I'm not expecting this to happen for a several years... So, hopefully there will be adequate time to prepare for the sponsorship responsibilities. As for the definition of "extended," I'd guess at least 6-12 months or so, since her mom wants to be around during her eventual pregnancy and after a baby is born. Depending on how the visit goes, my fiance has expressed hopes that her mom would eventually live with us one day.

Actually, her mom would prefer we have any kids in Russia - but after my own personal experiences with Ivanovo medicine, there is no way in the world that'll happen.




Thanks for the copy/paste... Interesting enough the site *still* errs out for me. I'm wondering if Russian IP addresses may be blocked by default -- or maybe Macs in general have problems with the board software...

Anyway, I'm not really clear about the relationships in this case. Is the foreign spouse already a USC, or still only a permanent resident? I can't find the USCIS link offhand, but I was pretty sure that only immediate relatives to a USC are able to be sponsored. Although, perhaps I'm getting confused with immigration visas versus visiting visas.

Thanks for the replies.

Z

I have no idea what the immigration consequences would be, so someone else might want to comment about that. But as far as the actual having a child in Russia goes, I wouldn't let that stop you. Women have been having babies for a couple years now, and most get by with no complications. That baby's going to come out whether she's in a hospital or the middle of Grand Central Station. If she's a young healthy woman, all the Doctor or midwife is going to do is play catcher.

In all seriousness, if having your child in Russia is important to her mom, then you can bet the farm that it's important to her. And if it's important to her, then your excuse that the medical facilities are sub-par is going to fly like a pregnant pole vaulter. She's first going to be angry that you are denying her this, and also that you're insulting her country's medical facilities. (It may be true, and she may even be critical of them herself, but as the foreigner you must tread much more lightly when it comes to these things.)

Unless she has a medical history that would make child birth complicated, you should really reconsider letting her have her child in Russia.

I'm not in agreement here, there are many reasons not to do this, chief among them insurance (does his family policy cover her medical expenses in Russia?) and the likelyhood that he may not be there for the birth of his child - and if he is there, how long can he stay? How long will his wife stay? I have no idea at what age infants can fly, but I would never put my wife and child through a 12-hour flight even months after our child is born.

My wife and I plan to have children and we'd love to have babushka with us at the time, but we belong together and our needs and the needs of our child are more important than hers. Heck, send her photos if she can't be present...

As the father of 3 children, I can tell you that babies are a lot tougher than new parents think. They travel fine, better than adults actually, although might make other passengers cranky. And I'm pretty sure it's going to be a lot cheaper to have a baby in Russia than the U.S., but I could be wrong.

Bottom line is that it needs to be a joint decision. I'm the worst person in the world to ask for relationship advice, but if she's feeling disrespected and excluded from this very important decisions, only bad things can happen. Not what you want for what should be one of the happiest moments in a couple's lives.

Just to counter your reasons, his wife and the child will both receive free medical care in Russia, because after all they will be / are Russian citizens. His wife and child will be able to stay, forever, because of their citizenship status. Infants can literally fly the day they are born, flown in the America lately? How long can he stay, that is one problem. And the biggest problem will still be the state of the Russian medical facilities and their arcane ways of neonatal care. No father allowed, better yet, no one allowed. Taking the children away from the mother and leaving them alone, and only brining them for feeding only. Wrapping the children up to prevent any limb movement until like the age of 6 months. In many ways our prison system and our farm systems are more hospitable then Russian birthing homes.

In fairness, after two years with her, Ira knows my opinions about this country inside and out. She doesn't like it, but she knows that more often than not, I'm right.

Even the WHO agrees with me on this one - Russia's infant mortality rate is more than 2.5X higher than in the US. Link.

But statistics aside, my thinking is really governed by experiences -- one of a close friend, and the other frighteningly personal...

My friend, who was 26 when she had her first child 4 months early... There was no apparent reason. Nothing showed up in prenatal care... There was no injury... And the kid spent months in an incubator with doctors fighting every day for his life. Today he's pushing three years, and while he's a bit small for his age, he's still in fantastic shape and is looking forward to a long life. He'd also be deader than a doornail if he was born in Ivanovo.

And my own experience is thus: I had a bought of severe chest pains one night last year. We called for Skoraya Pomish, and the ambulance took an hour to get to me (this is in a city of 400,000). When they arrived, one EMT was noticeably drunk, the other was a dirty elderly woman who couldn't have possibly had the strength to do CPR for more than a few minutes. The echo they did was abnormal, so they took me to the hospital in their filthy smokey smelly ambulance. They hadn't even any defibrillator with them or in the ambulance. And it's not like they didn't know they were coming to treat a heart patient.

In the hospital (if you can call it that), the doctors were all unkempt, dirty, clearly groggy from being woken up. The walls were disgusting, wires everywhere, dust and debris under every radiator and by every window sill. Beds weren't clean, doors didn't shut. The staff was as far from professional or discreet as I'd ever known. If I wasn't sick before going to that hospital, I surely would get something while there. I survived the experience, obviously, but I after days of unproductive poking and prodding at various clinics in Ivanovo, I had to fly back to NY to get a real diagnosis that was made after the docs looked inside me with modern tools (what a novel idea!) and found a nerve pinch in my neck that ended up causing all kinds of stress in my chest area.

Believe me -- I will NEVER allow my baby to be born in the kinds of conditions present in Ivanovo, or with those kinds of idiots calling themselves doctors. Ira knows it. She also knows why. And she knows the experience that shaped my opinion.

I know that women have been having babies for a long time. And I know western medicine isn't the be all and end all of medical science -- but when something goes wrong with your baby's health (and every time a woman goes into labor, the roulette wheel starts spinning), where would you rather be? Honestly...

Sorry for the rant.. But Ivanovo medicine is really a sore topic for me ...

Z

[deleted - unproductive reply on my part]

Well, I agree that it trying to respect everybody's feelings is important... And this is all a few years off anyway... And with luck, Ira's mom can be in the US with us to experience the miracle whenever it happens.

I just figured I'd ask about all this now, since I've heard many horror stories about the difficulty of getting family in for visits or even to live.

Z

Fair enough, sorry for dragging the discussion from your main point. As for getting family over here, I think it's important that your spouse and her family know that their chances of getting a Visa are pretty weak. Definitely try, but don't give them too much hope. If they get the Visa, it will be a pleasant surprise.

It's all good. Sometimes a good rant helps vent some stress anyway.



That's what I've heard -- it's a real bummer though. In addition to making Ira happy, I'd really like to have her mom around for a while too. She's a great woman, who I'm only now really getting to know (learning Russian is really really hard).

Z

To answer your OT:

Her mother and brother would have to apply for visitor (B2) visas. It's a crapshoot whether or not they'd get them and "caring for the grandchildren" as the reason for applying is never a sure way to get the visa; probably the best way to get denied. (Satellite had a good post on this in the other thread.)

If you want them to come for "an extended stay" then you'll have to apply for them through another form of visa and that takes a long, long time because it's an immigration, not visitor, visa.

As for the other topic of health care:

You've heard of the 90-year-old men that eat bacon every morning, smoke a pack of filterless Lucky's every day, etc., etc., etc., and you also hear about the young healthy guys that get ran over by a bus. Death is going to happen. Sometimes it happens at birth. Sure, there's a better chance, statistically, that your baby will be "saved" in the U.S. rather than in Russia, but if it's the baby's time to go, than the baby is going. Same with you. Had you had heart problems while in Russia, you probably would've died. You didn't. So did the Russian healthcare system really fail you?

Sure there's a lot to be said for pre-natal and neo-natal care and we all know minutes count when dealing with medical emergencies. However, with life and death.... it's not up to the doctors anymore than it's up to you! In'shah Allah. (Head over to the MENA thread to decode that one if you don't already know.)

Just to summarize:
1. Russians have been known for saying that you go to the hospital to die.
2. Russian hospitals are famous for making cripples out of their patients.

Just to give you an example, I am no medical expert so, I'll use laymen terms. My sister -in-law had a child with a heart defect that required under US medical conditions a shot administered directly to the heart in order to close it. The dose has to be very small. So small that only modern technology can be used. The dose must be delivered within 10 days of birth to be effective. If it is not done a surgery with greater risk to death is performed when the child is 6 months of age, in the meantime a risk of death or developmental problems continue. The Russian doctors diagnosed the problem but were unable to do delivery the dose of medicine due to lack of technology. It's these small issues that can become really big problems when dealing with Russian medical care, that make me shy away from ever relying on their care.

One of the biggest infrastructures hit by the collapse of the USSR was its hospital infrastructure. Before the collapse, most Russian hospitals and staff rivaled the West in their standards of care and technology, despite the propoganda we were fed by our government. But like everything else in the FSU, they have only a fraction of the resources to operate with these days. I'm told that medical education hasn't suffered that much, but there's only so much even the best doctors and nurses can do if they don't have the right tools.

I find that difficult to believe for two reasons primarily, neither of which are authoritative - they're opinions formed by observation or discussion mainly... And, of course, I'm limited in knowledge to the Ivanovo region specifically.

1- The majority of the "infrastructure" we enjoy in the US was built up over the last 100 years. If the US government collapsed, at least the landscape would be littered with highways, well constructed building, plumbing infrastructure, hospitals that were once state of the art. The hospitals in Ivanovo have old beds, like those we see in WWII movies, with no privacy whatsoever for patients. No oxygen lines, no gas tubes, nothing except big rooms with 4-6 ratsy beds. Not even curtains. There are more x-ray machines in average US cities than there are in the whole Ivanovski Oblast. Is this the type of legacy infrastructure that would be left over from a system that supposedly rivaled the West as little as 20-25 years ago.

2- Stories. I've also heard that people go to the hospital to die. But I've heard nothing from anybody in the past two years (including many proud Soviets), to indicate that the medical system of today is substantially worse than during the 80's. Nobody has said to me, "it wasn't like this in the USSR" as they often do on a wide variety of other topics. Actually, I am wrong - my language professor did once mention that Soviet medicine was great, but at the time she lived in Moscow (which, as I'm sure we all know, is practically a separate country in and of itself.

In all, I just find it hard to believe that a "super power" that didn't provide plumbing infrastructure to a large percentage of homes in a city as large as Ivanovo, could have really rivaled the West in anything other than military spending (the economics of which is a large part of the reason the Soviet Union collapsed). They may have gotten to space first, and held the world in fear, but based on all I've seen and heard, people weren't a high priority -- and so I can't imagine that adequately caring for them would be either.

So, for all those reasons, I humbly disagree.

Z

What happened with the baby?

Okay...so I'm not the one responsible for pulling your post off-topic this time.


You need to understand that much of what we consider to be important was unimportant in the Soviet state. We consider it necessary for a hospital bed to be comfortable, and have all kinds of call buttons and motors to tilt it up/down/wherever. In Russia, a hospital bed was (and is) to lay in and get better. There is no need for all those extra comforts, and it's considered by both staff and patient to be an unnecessary expense. As for technology such as X-ray machines, once things like that break, you need to have money to replace them. You can't expect an X-ray machine to last 20 years without breaking. So if there's no money to replace it, then they do what they can without it. But there was a day when most hospitals had very modern equipment.

To address the big rooms full of patients with no privacy, you need to know something about the Russians. They don't have the same concept of privacy that we do. Even in pre-Soviet days, the "commune" was what most Russians grew up in. Small social groups where everyone knew everything about everyone else. It was only under Khrushchev that massive apartment buildings (called "Khrushchev flats") started to give anyone any kind of privacy at all, but even these apartments had thin walls, and usually were occupied by more than one family or generation. The Western concept of privacy is for the most part unimportant to Russians. In fact, you probably noticed during your time in Russia that the whole concept of "personal space" is out the window. Curtains around your hospital bed would seem ludicrous to most Russians.


When I studied the USSR for the Navy (1987-1993), one of the biggest surprises to me was how much they invested in their social infrastructure. Lenin said "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country," and within a decade almost every home in the Soviet Union had electricity. They may not have had good plumbing (and still don't) but they had a light to read by at night. And when you consider the land mass of Russia, it makes the feat even more impressive. They were dead serious about their infrastructure.

I'm actually surprised that anyone is surprised by this. We poured as much or more of our resources into our military during the cold war, and yet we were also able to build up the social infrastructure we have today. Why is it so hard to believe the Soviets couldn't at least come close? I'm not saying that life was every bit as comfortable in the USSR as it is here, but it certainly wasn't the hell hole that many seem to think it was, or is. I'm also pretty amazed that your SO hasn't set you straight on a lot of this. Or maybe she's tried and you're dismissing it as national pride.


For some reason, plumbing was never a priority. I don't know why, although perhaps it's because they never experienced the plagues that ravaged London and many parts of Europe.


I would never defend Communism or the Soviet style of government. Communism destroyed so much of what Russia could have been, and its effects will still be felt long after I'm dead. But to be fair, it wasn't just the Soviets that the world lived in fear of. They lived in fear of both superpowers. But it doesn't change the facts that the USSR did provide excellent health care for its people, and what you are seeing now is a hollow shade of what was once a very good system. Disagree if you like, but it doesn't make it less true. Ask anyone in your fiancee's family who is older than 30 and they'll tell you the same thing.

I mean no offense, but many of your conceptions of what Russia was and is seems to be based on conjecture and secondhand. You might want to hit the library and start really learning about your SO's homeland. It is a rich and wonderful place, and if you approach it with an open mind you'll realize that not only is life not backwards and primitive, but there are many aspects that are better.

Guilty as charged... But, anyway, the original question has been answered for the most part -- difficult, yes, impossible, no.



I do take some offense to what you're implying -- which is that I've been sitting in my apartment, safe and secure for the past two years, living in relative isolation in a "little America." I can tell you that nothing could be further from the truth.

I'll grant you that I haven't driven across the country, from St Petersburg to Rostov, but I also don't claim to be an expert on any given topic. I can only report my opinions, which have formed after living in Ivanovo (and exploring this oblast). The conceptions that I had *before* coming to Russia were of a snowy wasteland. Now that was ignorant and based on conjecture, hearsay, and propaganda. The conceptions that I have now, of what Ivanovo is now, are based on my own real, looking out the window right now, experiences. Stories about the past, obviously come from my fiancé's family, my friends, professors, and acquaintances, who lived through that past.

Z

Please don't take offense, because none is meant. I'm not implying that you live in complete ignorance--you've obviously been to the country, which is something 99.99% of Americans have never done, so you're much further ahead than many. But I do believe that you've been misinformed on some things, and it's always better to hit a book or go straight to the source rather than trust secondhand information.

In a funny way, sometimes you can't even get the real story from a Russian. They love to complain about their country. Everything has always been bad, and better days are always around the corner but never seem to come. (But as a foreigner, they would consider it very impolite and hurtful if you were to join in on the bashing.)

My favorite Russian joke: The Russian pessimist says "Things are so bad in this country, they can't possibly get worse! The Russian optimist replies "Don't feel so bad, of course they can get worse!"

^^ That's all very true. I've also heard a joke about how Russians love to complain, but would beat a foreigner who agrees with them. Fortunately, my Ira and her family are far more insulted by a phony smile and a polite evasion of their questions. They've asked me for my truthful opinion many a time, and early on it was hard for me to give, but now I guess they've broken me of my "don't complain to your host" habit.

Their favorite expression is "Это Россия."

Z

Just thought I'd mention the spouse of a US citizen is eligeable for naturalization after 3 years as a Permanent Resident without leaving the United States for trips of 6 months or longer

Saludos,
Caro

Their way of saying "welcome to the family." You've obviously impressed them, good on you!


I can't tell you how happy it makes me that I can not only read that, but I know what it means. Baby steps...baby steps...

Well, if you want some lessons, Penguin puts out an excellent self-teaching course that's available from Amazon -- and my Russian professor (who is currently in China on a teaching exchange program) will be available for lessons via internet/telephone by the summer. She's a specialist in teaching Russian to foreigners and is currently working on her doctorate. She usually charges me about $10/hour when I'm stateside (although in person lessons are less because there's no overhead besides tea bags). When she returns to Ivanovo I can put you in touch with her if you like.

Z

Cool, that would be nice. I'm about 3/4 the way through the Rosetta Stone course. I really should be further, but I've been slacking over the holidays. Highly recommended as a personal study course. It's not going to be as good as having an actual tutor, but for me it's the next best thing.

The bay is now 3 years of age, doing just fine, and had the surgery at six month. Lucky for everyone the surgery was successful with no known side effects. But what would have been a simple and quick procedure in the US turned into a an unnecessary panic and risk. By the way, the Russian doctors did know of the procedure performed the US, but could only suggest going there because it was not available in Tomsk, Siberia. Not exactly a possible proposition for someone who makes a few hundred dollars a month and on such short notice.

Wow. I'm really glad everything turned out alright for the baby and your family... Let's hope all this oil money entering Russia will help improve conditions in the next few years...

I'm going to go ahead and guess the "oil money" in Russia will improve conditions for them about as much as the "oil money" here in the U.S. has improved conditions for us.

I almost got drawn into another major rant. God, I'm way to in love with politics

Z

With your name and your last name ( if it's real) I could of sworn that you are Russian 100%.......which probably you are but came here as a little baby?

Shikarnov comes from the adjective, "шикарный" (Russian for "smart" -- as in "Smart A s s"). Zhenya, is my American name translated into Russian. It started as a nickname that Ira's family gave me since Gene didn't inflect and change in a way they preferred.

Z

That's a much cooler story than how I got my knickname.

Gene is as russian name as it can be. It is called Gena or full name Genadiy.

So you are not russian at all?

Gene is short for Eugene, which is the English version of Yevgeniy. Zhenya is the short/tender form of Yevgeniy.

I'm 50% Greek, 25% Hungarian, 25% European mongrel. I suppose there might be a smidgen of Russian in my mix if I consult the family tree far enough back.

Z