Maxx121

You have a valid reason for not being able to meet her, as long as you can prove it then you can possibly get exempted from the meet in person requirement.

Mind you im no expert, but they do have the clause in there on the application.

Check it out.

thanks for the adviced..im trying to adjust wheeeww!!! anyway, how's your visa process? where is the exact location of your fiancee? take care

ugh, we are still waiting on noa2, this is gonna be our 4th month soon. Its not so bad though, i will be there for 9 days in 2 more weeks. hopefully we get the noa2 before then.

And she lives cebu, mandaue.

Congratz hehe they seem to finally be moving good luck with the next phase

I just found out that she sent an additional amount to her family in the Philippines that was equivalent to half a month's income for her. And she failed to consult with me ahead of time. Now she wants to go to school so she can work full-time and make a higher hourly wage. I can't imagine why I shouldn't insist that she save up her money and pay the initial tuition fees herself.

Honestly, if money is as big an issue for you as it seems, then maybe you should stay single. Cause in any marriage there will always be money problems. Im guessing your wife sent around $600 bucks home ($10*30 hours*4weeks/2) you can live of that for a month in the phils. So if she is taking care or them and not your home, at this point, if she isnt getting it, i would call it a day before she gets her GC and leaves you.

Cause to hear you tell it, it seems like she is here to work and send money back home and nothing else.

If you feel used then do what you have to do to send her back home, love turns smart people int fools.

If you are overreacting, then relax.

Yeah, now i think i was being a bit much. This whole thing is so very stressful to begin with and i think its just getting to me now. Now that i think about it the whole thing was so very stupid.

Ugh, i cant wait till this is over.

I so hate the idea of having to "prove" your in a real relationship. I mean being in a long distance relationship for me seems so weird, but here i am and i love her so very much. Guess i need to just relax.

Ok, personally i think this whole process is a load of #######, but i do understand the need for it.

Now Cathy and I were talking today and she had got a hold of some sample questions that were pretty basic. But it brought to light how yes we love each other, but there are alot of simple things that we dont know.

honestly there are some things that you just dont bother to go over until it comes up. and when you have a long distance relationship like this you just dont always have time to bring them up.

like how big a deal is it for her to know my exact address, she can tell you my email address with no problem, or my fathers address for that matter, i mean me and the guy hardly speak.

There were a few that got me upset like what plans have we made for the future, we talked so much about this but she was real basic about her response or what will she do when she comes here, again a real basic answer.

So how much should i worry about those quesitons and how detailed do the answers need to be? or am i making a big deal over nothing? i mean at this point after our talk i think she is waaaay more upset now.

congratz, welcome news

If i was still in the military i would just have my sgt right me one, or sit down with my first sgt and he would have him write one and he would sign it.

if you arent sure ask him to go talk to a military lawyer. only takes half a day and he gets to get outa some boring work to sit in a boring office.

but honestly his first sgt should do it that and copies of his w2s and recent pay pretty much prove that he is in military.

Thats a beautiful thing, hope he is up and running around soon

keep in mind that the holiday are right aroundthe corner

No CFO in manila is not that way. I have read where most people just do the CFO in manila when they do the medical then get the stamp in cebu after they get the visa. That is the way around dealing with that. CFO is stupid & a waste of time & money. Mhay did hers at PRISM after her interview.

Hmm, didnt know you could do the CFO in manila and get the sticker in Cebu. that would make things so much easier.

Nothing here, like the rest of you im still waitin on a follow up touch or even confirmation, i feel cheap and used

Congrats hehe ya update your timeline

Hi all,

I had my K-1 Fiancee visa approved today and just wanted to say a massive thank you to everyone on these forums. I have read over many many posts giving info on what to do at the interview and what forms to include etc etc and I don't think I could have done this whole process without all the information and help on this website.

Thank you again and good luck to everyone trying to be with their loved ones.

Nick

Congrats :)buuuut, please take a min to fill in your timeline

the exact same thing happened to me in manila and in cebu, being there and not seeing anyone like yourself for days or weeks is a new experience for me, when i saw another brotha, i mean black man, i felt relieved for some reason, so i got a taste of what we expect others to do for us, thanks for sharing that story because i could relate to it.

hehe yeah its a crazy feeling isnt it, relief to know your now the only one there doing something that seems so out of the ordinary. People ask me all the time how i can be apart from someone i love for so long, i just say: if i didnt spend this time apart from her i woulndt be able to be with her at all and this is better than that .

but yeah i got the you cant find a sista here to love but friends ask me that and not in a rude way. at least i hope its not in a rude way eheh

Before i made my first trip, i asked every phillipino i know, work with, and even at my doctors office where i should go. they all said mostly the same thing.

Stay in the cities and stay out of mindanoa (sp) hehe so i just stayed in cebu and called it a day.

My advice is if you know where to go and what you are doing then by all means go. But if you dont know the area and the background of the people there, personally i wouldnt.

They put up warnings for a reason and if you arent the type of guy who knows how to read and avoid danger then stick to the safe spots.

I grew up in NY city and hung out in some of the WORST neighborhoods here becuase they have some really nice spots that any tourist would love to visit. But most tourists stand out like sore thumbs and i wouldnt suggest to any of them to go to certain spots even if they would love it.

So stick to the tried and true

once you have some experience under your belt and can speak the language, by all means travel. its nice to know what someone is saying when they think you are just a dumb american. - you might hear: lets rob this fool when he turns the corner then you can just walk straight hehehe

Nothing would delight me if your calculations were right, but I have serious doubt about the authenticity of published numbers; though it would be hard to believe that a government agency would fudge their numbers publically. Case in point, look at national volume USCIS data for CSC July 09. Numbers indicate that 10,156 petitions were pending in June 09 and they processed 10087 petitions in July 09, USCIS received 2154 petitions in July 09. How in Earth they could have 10888 remaining petitions by end of month. Shouldn't 10087 petitions processed that month should have wiped out the previous balance.

On another note, because of my general frustration with the wait, I just starting punching random case numbers and i found tons, "250+" of July I-129F petitions with NOA1 before July 23 still waiting to be adjudicated. Oldest "Initial review" petition i could find was for July -06. My NOA 1 is July 22 so I am not sure what and when to expect because i found some petitions with my NOA1 were approved way back in August!!!!. Go figure!! Most heart breaking was to see a petition of NOA 1 date of July 19 and Approval Date of Aug 13. Nothing against them ,but real sad that some are preferred for reasons over other. At the same point it was consoling to see that i have abundant company in misery with lot of people waiting patiently like me.

My 2 cents is that they whole process is random which makes the waiting game even more frustrating.

I don’t wana even make an attempt to look at CsC , but did you also take into consideration the ones awaiting customer action?

A coworker looked over my shoulder when I was working on VCS number and asked what the heck was that. When I told him he immediately pointed out to me that I didn’t always take into consideration the awaiting customer action numbers. I told him to screw off its close enough hehe.

But yeah to really trace it you have to know how they work on files, and only they know that. Oh well, my best guess is this should be a busy week for our approvals.

WOW! you guys are so luck to have it approved within a WEEK! i looked at your old post and tried going to the "travel alert" link. unfortunately, page not found. i guess it might have worked into my advantage that the fax didnt go through. i had left out a document that i thought i didnt need, but i guess its always safe to send it just in case. thanks for your input. whats the "travel alert" about by the way..

maybe try faxing it from a different fax? try a kinkos or soemthing. at this point its prolly your fax.

cute

A family is a wonderful thing. Structurally, it's a small community that provides support for its members. All are in "one boat."

In the "old" days -- and these old days are to a large part still lived in Hispanic and Asian communities -- families with members from 3, often 4 generations live under one roof. Once Grandma and Grandpa are too old to work, the younger members of the community take care of them. These can be quite big boats, especially if they pop out babies like rabbits in order to enlarge their support system.

In modern western societies, and the US American society is part of it, these huge families are a thing of the past. With the rise of social security and pension and retirement funds, we nowadays prefer smaller boats.

Once a daughter from a large family is being given away to a man from another family and gets married, they have their own boat and, like in this case, the boat is sailing to a place thousands of miles away. The umbilical cord is cut and a new family is founded.

At this time, man and wife need to take care of their own family. I defies Western thought to send money to the old family. But even if you apply the nexus of morality (sorry, I'm a "studied" philosopher), Kant's categorical imperative, then morally you would only be obligated to provide what you would expect to get in return.

So here are the two questions to ask yourself and your wife: will her old family send money to you, to help you out, should the need arise, and would you expect them to send you money? Depending on your answers, you can deduct the extent of your moral obligation to them. Kant in layman's terms is like this: do to others what you expect them to do to you, or, in the negative, don't do to others what you wouldn't want to be done to you.

I only hope that you and your wife are not only physically, but also morally in the same boat. If not, one has to leave. Most likely, that's the person who can swim back to the big boat and feels like that boat is still somewhat the boat she belongs to.

Great post, hehe i cant say that Kant doesnt apply to my family because it does hehe. And thats why i feel sooo lucky to have my wife and her family and my kids will spend almost every summer of their lives in teh phils learning those same values my wife was raised on so they dont become spoiled american bratz

@ Gilles think it was YGR who said this first, but yeah you need counselling. My suggestion is find a philipina marriage counselor and send her there if you want to try to give your marriage a shot. if not, you will put yourself in a very early grave or she will eventually leave you.

Food for thought, i know a guy from california that married a young filipina and she came here and left him after a few years to be with someone else who had less issues than he. he wasnt perfect but she didnt believe int eh for better or worse and when and found better.

sucks, fix your problems now or be alone later

it's not limited to phils. i had to smack more than one chinese guy in the face for trash talking my chinese wife. none of them expected me to understand their insults, and they were all suprised to wind up on their asses on the blacktop. most times we were in a crowd of strangers, and someone would say, in english, "he deserve that". once i answered, "tian xia, huang di yuan" (heaven is high, and the emperor is far away - people try to get away with stuff when they think they can)

Thats the main reason im trying to learn the language now, its just so hard to find a book that teaches it here in the US. I found one called Conversational Cebuano ( or something like that) but its not all that good bot it will do for now.

I just hate that in some contries people think americans are stupid. They dont realize how much tourism dollars mean for a counties economy.

But if i knocked someone out cathy would have a heart attack hehe, i would have to send her on her way first

@Atencio: yeah ive lived through that all good black men are taken by white or asian women thing, bleck women say that about their missed opportunities, cause balck guys who date interracially have at some point dated black women. ive dated interracially all my life and the funny thing is, most women dont think you are good unless they can put you under a microscope in some way.

Alot of american women make microscope checks based off visual and materialistic things when it comes to men they date, i dont pass alot of those visual material checks so the ones i wuold want to date wouldnt give me a second look unless i pressed real hard for a shot. I dont have time for all that and have instead chose to stop looking, when i did that i found that I was dating interracially much more, no idea why really. now i have my cathy and it just so happens she is asian and cares about the same things tha i do and i love her for that.

go figure...

(oh and "sore" - hehe spelling errors dont mind me i rush when i type)

whenever i get a fax number that wont go through i call using my phone to see if i hear the fax tones, if you dont, then its not a fax number. just keep trying like they said if it is a fax number.

Good Luck

also, ask if you can mail the documents just in case.

I never really stood out when I was there. Everybody I met was nice to me, and offering me beer and pulutan in the province. Then in Manila I had no one stare at me or us, except for the time on the LRT, when I could not figure out how to use the card. Then people realized I was not from PI. I think the fact the I am a local born mixed Asian from Hawaii, made me blend in in PI more than a 6 foot plus older Kano. I guess things are different in region 1,esp Ilocos Norte. The first question for me was, if knew some relative in Waipahu, Kalihi, or Ewa Beach, since I am from Hawaii, they were always nice to me.

hehe yeah i stand out like a soar thumb, the entire time i was there i saw only one other black guy in the robinson. was funny cause we both looked at each other and shared a special understanding and just smiled and never said a word hehe

Ok at least i know its not just me then, but I doooo understand i came from slums just got out of em is all. But like the idiot i am i visit slums all over teh world,like on the nights when Cathy was not there (parents wouldn’t alow her without chaperone when I first went) I would be bored and just go for walks. A habit I picked up in the military is to go to some of the bad areas and just look around and see what its like there and compare it to where I grew up, the people, the places, the problems. And much of it produces the same mentality. (cathy had a fitttt when she found out)

See me and my friends didn’t have to deal with foreigners taking our females we had to deal with guys who had what we didn’t taking them, and jealous is the same all over. In the phils They handle it in the same bad way, and the fact that women let men slide with it there is the reason it prolly goes on.

If we did that with the wrong female where i grew up there would have been about 30 guys in the street fighting it out, mind you, this happened every now and again, but not so often it turned into a deterrent and led to the “ im not fighting over no female mentality” which gave women more room to become the arrogant people they are in certain societies.

Another thing that got under my skin is when one of her male friends would get touchy touchy with her, he would pull her and laugh be very ruff and she would give him her fake laugh and he would treat her like she was a guy even though it was obvious she was uncomfortable (maybe to me anyway) . When I first saw it it caught me off guard cause she hates that. So I asked her whats his problem, and she explained it off like oh that’s just how he is, when I said but you hate that, she just said its fine. So when she wasn’t around I pulled him to the side and told him what was proper and what was not, he just smiled and change the subject and we went on talking.

But he never did that again and she called me one day and said he was being supper protective of her with their friends and said he never does that what did I say to him and I told her. She was so very shocked and said that wasn’t nice, but then said thank you in her own way.

its just annoying cause i was raise to believe you dont disrespect women, and my sisters where raise to beleive dont let a man disrespect you.

culture shock i guess

Love is a two way street man, and just my observation, you sound like you are on a one way. I wish you much luck.