Replacement Visa

[C-ma'am 684]

Sweet Lord Praying for you.... this certainly needs to stop.. and it will.

I'm so sorry you are going through this

[Eve & Jim 4]

Maybe this wouldn't be so bad it it wasn't my own country that is doing this to me. It is all starting to feel like a very personal attack and that no matter what I do or how many fees I pay they will never allow us to be together. Today was Mae's 17th birtday and I didn't send anything to them in the Philippines because I thought they would be here and so I feel bad that I wasn't able to do anything for her. I sent them a package over 5 weeks ago with some stuff for the trip here and it still hasn't arrived, and I guess maybe it never will. I thought about using one of those remote delivery services but they are really expensive and I just paid airfare that is kind of in a holding pattern, and $1200 for new visa fees and new medical exams that they can't use without the passports.

Eve called St. Luke's and they will do the medical exams based on a copy of their passports but they will need to present the passports before the results will be sent to the Embassy. So she is going to proceed to start that process tomorrow, hoping that she doesn't have to go through another sputum culture. Doing the sputum smears wouldn't be so bad because it's only 3 days, but if they require another culture then that is an 8 week delay. The interview is scheduled for the 21st unless we have to move it due to the medical.. We are just hoping that the passports show up in the next few days.

Eve and Mae have been living out of the boxes that had packed and ready to bring here for over 2 weeks now, and progress is very slow. Mae was taken out of school before graduation because Ohio Law states that if someone has a diploma, domestic or foreign, they are not entitled to public education, and she wanted to graduate from school here in the U.S. The sad thing is that she would be graduating the end of this month from her Catholic school there in the Philippines. We didn't put her back in school right away because we thought this might get cleared up quickly. Now it is too late and she would be too far behind and I feel like we may have made a mistake.

Needless to say this is all really beginning to take a toll on everyone involved. We keep hoping they will be here for some event like Christmas or Valentines Day or a birthday and we keep getting disappointed. We watch while others who have applied after we did just zoom through the system without any problems at all. While I accept the blame for some of the mistakes like not knowing about the Japanese Police Clearance until after the interview, the CENOMAR that was requested at the interview and ordered the next day remained lost well past the time it too to get the Japanese Police Clearance. We should have read that part of the instructions closer and ignored the DS-157 item #9. It just seems that the U.S. Embassy has created their own share of probems in my case too.

--Jim

[Eve & Jim 4]

This is a picture of the street outside of St. Luke's when Eve came out from her 2nd day of Sputum sample submission 27 Sept 2011. It was during Typhoon Nesat. She was afraid that she wouldn't be able to get home but got lucky when she was able to walk several km to a jeepney area that was still running. The trains were not running due to a electrical explosion of some kind. She has called ahead to see if she could reschedule due to the typhoon and they told her she would have to reschedule and wait a couple weeks and start over from the begining. So she went out in the typhoon. Attached is photo from her cell phone of what it looked like when she came out of St. Luke's. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-15070550