Arcanto

Actually she wrote her first name, paternal/middle name and surname in Russian and I transcribed them into English so we ended up with the same name in both Cyrillic and Western writing. There's no need to change it and you really want to end up with the same thing both ways to avoid confusion later on.

I'm in the same boat as you; from everything I've heard the American Embassy in Almaty is quick and efficient but the paperwork will still take an average of 5 months from start to finish. The waiting is hard but it's good to know that we have a good embassy to work with once things do start to get processed!

Sometimes they'll send your application to a different service center though...for example I sent mine into the Nebraska Service Center because I'm in Colorado but they transferred it to the California Service Center. So you might get lucky as well - you never know!