Fingerprinting

Road Trip to the Department of Homeland Security!

Last Monday Tina and I had our appointment to be fingerprinted as part of the process of getting our I171H. We had to be down in Tukwilla, near the SeaTac airport by 10:00 AM. It was a beautiful day and there was very light traffic on the way down. We made great time and had no trouble finding our way to the place.

We cleared the metal detectors and had our belongings x-rayed, it was just like the airport. Then we got in line with a bunch of people who may have been weak and weary, yearning to breath free, but they mostly just appeared to be very concerned as to wether or not they had the correct forms with them. I didn't see any obvious terrorists, so maybe the system is working.

Anyway, they had some really great hi-tech gear for scanning our fingerprints. Everything was digital, no ink! The whole process from beginning to end only took a half an hour.

We headed back north and stopped in Mount Vernon for lunch at the Skagit River Brewery, then went to the Skagit County Health Dept. to get the second round of our Hep A and B vaccine series.

It was actually a pretty fun day and it felt good to be moving forward in the process again.

They told us that it might be helpful if we contacted the offices in Yakima and let them know that we were adopting a child with special needs. So we waited a few days then emailed them the following note:

We are writing to request that our I600A application be expedited. We

have received official approval from the China Center for Adoption

Affairs to adopt a waiting child with special needs. His name is Dang

Hui, he is living in a Social Welfare Institute (orphanage) in Baoding

China. He is 28 months old, and waiting for medical care at Children's

Hospital in Seattle. We have attached a copy of the letter for your

review.

We were fingerprinted in Seattle on Monday, April 18th for our

application for foreign adoption. Our filing date is March 07, 2005.

Many of the documents we have gathered are already notarized are date

sensitive, and will expire if we do not have our dossier sent to China

by late May.

Can you please let us know the status of our application, and the

anticipated time frame for processing our 171H? We appreciate your time

and help in this matter.

Thank you,

Scott and Christine Ocheltree

We were really surprised when we got the following message back yesterday, Monday 4/26...

Scott & Christine,

I gave your request to Adjudicating Officer and he would like to see a

letter from Children's Hospital explaining the disability of the child, what kind

treatment they will be doing and when the child has an appointment to be

there.

You case should be done in 2 or 3 weeks but if you can get that information

we can do it faster.

Thanks

Adoptions Unit

415 N. 3rd. St.

Yakima, WA 98903

((509) 225-6838 (fax)

+Yakima.Adoptions@DHS.GOV

We're not sure how we are supposed to have an appointment at Children's when we can't get travel approval from China without the document we are waiting for from Yakima, but we are going to have our family doctor write a letter for us to fax in. Either way, this is WAY faster than we had anticipated. So things are moving pretty quickly again!!

Fingerprinting Appointment

I guess it is true: When it Rains, it Pours!

So here is my second post in one day, after weeks of no posting.

When Tina checked the mail today she found a package from the USCIS! They have us scheduled to get our fingerprinting done at 10:00 AM on Monday, April 18th!

This means we won't be driving to Yakima next Thursday. I'm kind of bummed about that a bit now, because Pat McCutcheon had asked me if we would stop by their place on our way. It would have been great to see him and Paula and Jasper. I guess we'll have to wait to see them now.

The good news though is that things are moving forward again. The whole idea of scheduling the review in Yakima was actually in hopes of getting them to move on our application before the appointment, and it worked. This was an idea Tina got from other people on the internet who had done the same thing. Funny, ask for an appointment to find out what's taking so long, and suddenly you get your appointment. Apparently all the cliches are true: "when it rains, it pours", and "the squeaky wheel gets the oil".

So stay tooned, it looks like this blog might be getting more interesting here for a while!

PA Arrived!!

Things are starting to happen again!


Today we received the following document via email from our adoption agency. This is the document from the Chinese government saying they approve of our adoption of Kai (Dang Hui). There had been a big lull in seeing anybody receive these since the Chinese New Year celebration. Suddenly the internet boards were all buzzing yesterday as people started to hear from their agencies that their Prior Approvals were arriving via email from China.

Tina was certain that ours would be here any minute. Then last night our internet connection at the house went out so we couldn't check our email. When I got to work this morning I checked my email, and this had arrived at 6:06 PM last night.










The next big hurdle still ahead of us is getting the I-171H form from the

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

(USCIS). Now that they are part of the "Department of Homeland Security" this process has become very slow in Washington state.

Tina and I have scheduled an appointment to drive over to Yakima next Thursday to "review our application". Our hope is that we will be able to get them to make some forward movement in the process for us.