chikondichamayi

Wow, a brother that doesn't ask for money all the time and actually does good in school. This just made me think of how my brother used money I sent for school fees to drink, failed all classes,yet everyone expects me to forgive him just like that and want me to TRY TO ASK HIM WHAT HE WANTS TO DO IN HIS LIFE. Am sorry if i sound bitter, i am still angry about it. One of the reasons that had me question what i can actually put up with although i obviously love my family.

I have seen a lot of people, at least 6, get approved shortly after being transferred to NBC. I had started losing hope that maybe not me, but I was pleasantly surprised. Keep on being positive!

I think all (correct me if I'm wrong) have been filers from Texas. On the USCIS website it says the processing time for the Texas Service Center is 5mths so that seems to fit these filers. 

Y'all, I finally got a notification today ! New Card Being Produced.
 
Here is my timeline, I know I appreciated it when I was lurking on here.
 
I filed at Texas and case number is SRC.
Case received:8/24/20
Biometrics reused:10/02/20
Case transferred to NBC:11/09/20
NEW CARD PRODUCED: 12/22/20
 
One thing I noticed is all those transferred to NBC are getting approved according to their dates transferred. Last week it was those transferred 11/02. Just my thoughts.

Y'all, I finally got a notification today ! New Card Being Produced.
 
Here is my timeline, I know I appreciated it when I was lurking on here.
 
I filed at Texas and case number is SRC.
Case received:8/24/20
Biometrics reused:10/02/20
Case transferred to NBC:11/09/20
NEW CARD PRODUCED: 12/22/20
 
One thing I noticed is all those transferred to NBC are getting approved according to their dates transferred. Last week it was those transferred 11/02. Just my thoughts.

Lmao that first paragraph was so funny. You are straight forward and I  respect that. I don't think I would have the guts to do it though haha.

Love of family doesn't mean you have to provide for him to drink 
tell him i love you but i don't send money for alcohol and / or any drugs
 
i have let Adil do as he wants with his pay and notice that now  he sends less to Morocco and offers more for the house here
like paying for the new deck,  buying 2 TV's and a new dishwasher and more
when he 1st came i paid it all and he helped family back home and talked to them every minute of his day off
now,  he talks a few hours and cooks and cleans here and when i say "talk to this family member or anther one,  he says No, they want money and i am not a rich American

Wow, a brother that doesn't ask for money all the time and actually does good in school. This just made me think of how my brother used money I sent for school fees to drink, failed all classes,yet everyone expects me to forgive him just like that and want me to TRY TO ASK HIM WHAT HE WANTS TO DO IN HIS LIFE. Am sorry if i sound bitter, i am still angry about it. One of the reasons that had me question what i can actually put up with although i obviously love my family.

Same here. I can't say no to my mom too and I wouldnt want her to not ask when she needs but I said budget irrespective of if she asks. More like a monthly or 2weeks thing. That way she would have enough when the need arises. 
For your sister,i would think the logically thing here if you weren't abroad is to live on her pay grade. Why get a house you can't pay for with your salary. In Nigeria we pay rents yearly(so with that salary you should figure out how to save up for that rent during the year with whatever salary you have) . So depends on your country,why send 250usd monthly to a house where she makes 1/3 of the rent monthly. That is way above her pay grade and those are the things you should talk to them about. Imagine send 250usd monthly to your sister that is working, another $$ to the one in school and some more for mom. That is alot of monthly expenditure. Not even including unforeseen circumstances that requires money before those monthly expenses. Then imagine your husband taking care of most the bills maybe including your school which you are going to still help your family.(I hope you don't say that too much to his hearing tho) . Turn the situation around. 

@Bob in Boston Hahahaha I will add context to you and other VJers
 
I forgot to add that while with my former employer, I had to part with the $40 US currency that I had. I gave it to him after coming out of the underground garage and on our way to the barber shop, where he had insisted on escorting me to as he “knew” the best barber in town (it was his barber friend. I had casually mentioned that I needed to shave). I knowingly wanted to shave in Kenya to support business. Additionally, shaving in an upscale barber shop in Kenya is still 10% the normal cost here in Texas. Local mom and pops are even cheaper, at around $0.25. Yes, you read that right. I ended up not having there as the guy was taking forever. So, I shaved later at another upscale shop for $2.5 dollars. I even tipped the three barbers that were in the shop when I shaved, all for under $5, though only one had tended to me. They all looked at me surprised.

How did the $40 come into my possession? My wife had dropped me off at IAH for my 3:55pm Lufthansa flight. Feeling bad that she had not had time to have lunch with me, she gave me the $40. I declined initially but she insisted, probably guilt due to missing scheduled lunch. A day like this, where my wife offers me money, comes once in a blue moon, so I took the money at the second offer. She will kill me if she ever finds out that this money ended up with my former employer and not used personally on me. 

Back to my dad and on our way deep into the village to look at investments: My dad sat at the front passenger seat. Suddenly, my mom wants to sit directly behind him. I do not know for what reason. I shooed her off because she had no problem sitting behind the driver the previous day (the previous day, she had declined to sit at the front and let me sit there. This is very uncharacteristic of my mom. I still have not come to terms of how she let me sit at the front). Anyway, she is mad but sits where she sat the previous day. The journey deep into the village begins. My dad BECAME the de facto driver. The cab driver had to constantly follow his directives: stop here, I wanna wave to the villagers, go here, turn round, do this doughnut on the road (he did not say this. I just added it for drama), go over here I wanna wave to the police etc. From my back seat, I could sense the driver getting irritated. 
And let me not get started at how MLM have taken root in Kenya and how people are poor because they toss al their money into it, my mom included. 

There is an interesting part of my vacation that I am not going to add here because it totally deviated from OP. So, I will put it in a new thread titled “Epic International encounters.” 

Moderators: Please allow me to provide a link, on my thread, to this one, so that I do not have to write the beginning of the story again.

I will stop here for now. 
 

OP needs to watch the bolded carefully. 
Additionally, if you go home, do not tell everyone. Just pop up n pop out when vacation is done. That is a lesson I learnt.
 
Funny, when I went back last year, I explicitly told my young sister (who stays with my married elder sister that picked me from the airport) not to tell any of my cousins I was around. So I am sitting there watching the noon news and in pops one of my cousins. He sat the entire evening, being fed and supplied with my BIL's alcoholic beverages, courtesy of my small sister (I do not drink). Later on when he decides to leave, he suddenly does not have fare. I have to pay. Additionally, he wants pocket money before he leaves. My sister later admitted to telling him that I was around. He then went and told the rest of my cousins and my phone never got a break. Later, my small sister's friend keeps insisting I go out, that she has missed me. It had to be in these upcoming upscale bars that charge a leg and and arm for substandard stuff because they are the "new thing in Kenya that everyone wants to associate with." Funny enough, they are just the standard American bars that people drink while playing board games. However, since they are new in Kenya and with some fancy design, we have to pay massively to use them.
 
Next day I go to town to visit my old workplace. Suddenly, I have to buy them lunch BUT at the upscale restaurant they've always wanted to go to. Nonetheless, I gladly do. Then my old employer wants me to furnish him with $3000 for business. Yes, you read that right. He put me in his car in an underground garage and gave me an hour's run down of this business he wanted to venture in. I had to come up with a good excuse out of this. 
 
I then leave and go to the next town to visit my mom (right before she moved to the US). This is the town where 70% of my extended family is at and so was my childhood. Suddenly:
She is broke My neighbors got wind that I am around, courtesy of my mom My aunties appear - my mom had told them and said it is "bad manners not to tell them I am around" She cannot use public transport. We had to hire a cab which had to pick her right from the doorstep, not even the gate, doorstep.  Few days later, we are going to the village to visit my dad. Again, my mom cannot use public transport. She wants a cab. The village is far away from this city (1 hour away from the nearest town but 7 hours away from where we currently are). She wants the cab for this 7 to 8 hours drive and me to foot the bill. We look for one but end up not getting any as it was a weekend. So we go with the upscale public transport. 
 
Our first public transport only goes 90% of the journey. We have to jump on another to finish the trip. My mom had already organized a cab. The guy picks us up for the remaining 1 hour journey to the village. We get there, my mom does not want to alight at the gate. The guy had to drop her off at the doorstep. Villagers mill around and come to help us carry our shopping into the house. I do not recall carrying anything into the house. The villagers had carried everything within a minute of us getting here.
 
Next day, the cab comes back to take us one hour drive deep in the village to look at some investment. We get there, but the remaining (2 mins by car, 10 mins one way by foot) drive is rocky and unattainable for the low car. My dad walks me out of the cab and we walk to the site. Unbeknownst to me, he was only surveying the route because when we got to the site, he told us to head back and now come back with the car as he had seen a possible route🤦‍♂️. So we had to walk back (10mins), get the car and make the GRAND entrance at the site. The cab had to also be parked strategically at the site. Then the villagers came. We had to part with $$ so as to make him not look bad, courtesy of the status they have created in the village. 
 
Surprisingly, when I left the US for vacation, I only wore flip flops under my feet. They proved convenient at airport security check points. When I landed in Kenya, they looked at me surprised as if we walk on air in America and not flip flops.  
 
I cannot, even
I hope my story is hilarious.
And by the way, this is all true
 
 

YES! Especially if you're siblings are more than capable to work/already have jobs.
 This 100%!! This happens with humanitarian aide / short term missionary trips ALL the time!
 
You are the gate-keeper for your family against stuff like that. Do not let this kind of thing put a wedge and eat away at the relationship between you and your husband! He may be understanding now but that may change.
 
It's amazing how quickly the rose-colored glasses are put on once a family member starts living in the US. We here in the US are certainly rich in many ways though it may not show in our bank accounts as such. My husband comes from the 2nd poorest county in the western hemisphere (Haiti is the first) so he's all too familiar with need and also people who play the poor card to make a quick buck. A few friends and siblings of my husband's would try to squeeze money out of him but he saw right through them. "I'm sick and need medicine..." etc. Think about it. They were able to get by and come up with money BEFORE he came here and will (have to) continue to figure it out. They stopped asking eventually. Every once in a while we send money to his step-mom and two youngest siblings to help with food especially since the country went to the pits in 2018 and the economy crashed. She doesn't ask but Mike just does it out of the blue. Sometimes his younger brother (they are quite close) asked for money to help with getting him to school certain conferences/competitions. So it was for his education AND he has the top-notch grades in telecommunications and engineering to prove that he works hard, in which case we would help with MOST but not all the of cost.
 
So we send money maybe once every 5 months. Usually like $100 and it's not because people are begging us to do it but because we have a little extra that we are able to spare. We just sent money last month to his other grandparents because they lost their crop to the 2 hurricanes that blew through the country. They didn't ask and weren't expecting it but were extremely grateful and surprised! 
 
When his Grandma was terribly ill NONE of his 8 older siblings helped AT ALL. In fact, they would come to her to ask HER for money. like REALLY?? Never had time to actually visit her, mind you. When she almost died my husband went down there to get what she needed like a nebulizer and some other things. 5 of those 8 older siblings, who were all raised by her live in the same town and "didn't have time to visit" after we purchased an expensive last minute ticket over New Years. 
 
Your family must understand that you are not a vending machine!  Let them be mad at you because if they love you as sister/daughter it SHOULD NOT matter in the end. Money can turn people into monsters.
 
Good luck!
 
 

OMG 15 family members, that is so impossible- I struggle with only 4. I went back to school for a better future earning potential so I depend on husband for home bills. He pretty much pays everything except my car and the money I send home. In emergencies back home, he helps me out but I try to limit this. I know its depressing for him seeing his savings go down  and I really don't wanna put this on him. I definitely know if I had a child, it would be so different. KIDS are EXPENSIVE! SO I understand changing life circumstances will definitely influence my future decisions to help. I will also try to treat myself a bit more. Thank you!

For real? Getting mad for not sending money when you couldn't?Wow. I know people act as if we just get money from the side of the road. I work so hard while going to school full time and still send all the hard earned money home. And they only have to go to school. So frustrating!

Haha, I so get the status thing, I have seen in a lot. And every time I get a text or go home, I have to give money to everyone now I am scared of going at all. But one thing for sure,  do not send money to other relatives and friends. I am barely making it helping my immediate family, I can only imagine the chain reaction that would create. I appreciate your perspective, I definitely wanna draw some boundaries and make sure I am not being taken advantage of , while ensuring I help when truly needed. THANK YOU VERY MUCH, I will try this.