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| Manila, Philippines |  Review on May 12, 2013: |
Ed and Elnie
Rating:  | Review Topic: K1 Visa
Elnie and I had expected the very worst and prepared for it in every way we could. Our original petition was huge but well organized to help speed things along (multiple colored folders with clear tables of contents throughout) and Elnie carried updated evidence and explanations with her to the actual interview. We\'d prepared for her to be grilled about my income, my multiple previous marriages and our age difference, which is unusually vast. She carried letters from me concerning many possible questions and had memorized detailed information about my previous marriages, her living situation when she arrives in Texas.
None of it was needed, thankfully. Perhaps it was our many prayers, because the other reviews from that week also seem to indicate a streamlining and more lax attitude from the Consulate.
Elnie arrived on May 7 at the gate at 4am, which worried me in case she was the first to arrive and would have to stand alone on Roxas, totally defenseless and without a phone to call for help. As luck would have it, she said there already were many many people there and lines forming, but she was at the front of the K-1 queue. They allowed her to enter at about 6:30am and everything went slowly but smoothly. We had drilled on which papers to hand over and when, and she knew right where each was located in her personal packet. I won\'t go through the stages of the process since it has already been described in detail, only that when she got to the final interview the Consul was all business and asked her only the very basic questions, not requiring any of her evidence.
The only hitch in the whole experience was that at the 2GO window she seems to have been told her visa would be delivered in two to three weeks instead of the normal 3 to 5 days... but it could be that she was so elated that she\'d passed so easily that she wasn\'t listening closely.
Second hitch has nothing to do with the interview itself... she had flown from Cebu on a small cheapie airline which was delayed in both directions, but delayed 6 hours waiting to fly home. Then at Cebu she got her bag mixed up with another that looked exactly the same and that led to a few hours of panic since her bag contained many original documents that would be hard to replace, as well as her plunder from her post-interview shopping spree. javascript:emoticon(\' \')
UPDATE: BE WARNED THAT THERE IS A SEMINAR REQUIRED FOR EXIT FROM PHILIPPINES!
It is at the CFO office in Manila or Cebu. Elnie will attend Monday after she picks up her passport/visa at the Consular Agency in Cebu. Our dilemma now is whether or not she can go ahead and book her flight before the seminar, since I do have previous marriages and that seems to be a specific trigger for scrutiny. My feeling at the moment is to suggest she picks up her visa at 8am (She lives in Minglanilla, about an hour's drive away) and then book her flight at the airport, then go to the CFO and try to do the seminar that afternoon. If I decide there is a serious chance of delay due to the CFO, she'll have to make another trip to buy her ticket. I was extremely upset to learn about this hidden mine trap, because if we hadn't managed to learn about it, she would have been blindsided when she tried to catch her flight to USA.
(updated on May 18, 2013)
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Consulate / USCIS Member Review #11950