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| Egypt |  Review on February 5, 2014: |
Heather&Ramy
Rating:  | Review Topic: K1 Visa
As another reviewer said, "what do we pay these people to do?"
Communication with the embassy is impossible, they only answer every inquiry with "please note... we have nothing to tell you." Their "process" is completely and frustratingly opaque. They never update their website, and even when they update it, there are errors. They actually updated January's interview schedule, but we were not on it, so imagine how surprised we were when we discovered that our interview was indeed schedule in January! So I would not advise people to put to much trust in what the embassy says on their website.
My fiance's interview was blessedly short and he was not asked any of the hard questions we expected, and yet the interviewer was rude, curt, and condescending. My fiance misunderstood the interviewer when he asked for two copies of one document and one copy of another, and my fiance gave him one copy of each. That was when the rudeness began, as the interviewer said "if you don't understand my English this interview will not go well." (My fiance understands English just fine, and proved that in the rest of the interview... he just misheard.)
He was asked these questions:
-When did you meet your fiance and when did you get engaged?
-How many times have you met?
-Is she with you now? (In response to my fiance's statement that our last meeting was October til now)
-What is your job?
-Are you still working there until now? (We are not sure if he guessed that my fiance lost his job due to the political turmoil or what...)
-What job do you plan to do in America?
My fiance answered all of these questions very simply and concisely, and was not asked to elaborate or give further details.
And that was it! Nothing grilling about if we had a real relationship or if we knew each other's families or if we were already married or something like that. I had heavily frontloaded our original file and so it appears that our selected relationship evidence and evidence of meeting was convincing. He also appeared to accept my dad filing as my joint financial sponsor, with me being a student and nearly financially dependent on my parents at the moment.
He told my fiance to renew his TB test with the original doctor and would not give him an answer as to whether we were approved, he said he could not give an answer until after the results of the TB test were received.
So January 21 was the day of the interview, we renewed the TB test in Alexandria on January 22 and had to wait to get the results on January 25. On January 26, we took my fiance's passport and the test results to DHL and had them mailed. I don't know exactly what day they arrived at the embassy, but on February 3 our visa was issued according to the CEAC website. In all, our visa was issued only 9 business days after our interview, and only 7 business days after we mailed it to the embassy. We are so lucky, because this is certainly not the normal time frame in Cairo right now!
I do want to mention for those going after us that some of the veterans on the board speculated that we might have short or no AP after the interview since my fiance is an Egyptian Christian and has a relatively uncommon non-Muslim name. Nobody knows exactly what goes on in AP of course, but there is some speculation that it involves name checks and such and that having a common name might cause longer AP if there are possible criminal matches. Females tend to have less AP than males and Christians less than Muslims. So I don't know why that is the case or if there is really a hard and fast rule there, but it did turn out that way for us.
Overall our dealings with the embassy were frustrating because of the lack of communication and lack of honesty about the expected time frame. The embassy doesn't seem to put a lot of effort into keeping information up-to-date and accurate. However, their dealings with us related to the visa seemed fair and straightforward, even if the interviewer was unpleasant. And as my fiance and I are genuinely in a relationship and we are not criminals, and they gave us the visa, they seem to get the job done finally.
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Consulate / USCIS Member Review #13801