Land of the Soap Opera and Talk Show

Over a month ago we mailed $830 and our application to the application to petition to bring a foreign orphan overseas to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS). Funny enough, they cashed our check immediately and sent us a handwritten receipt, but said it will be a couple more weeks before they could send us an appointment to come into office and see them. In the beginning of October they sent us a very formal looking letter stating our date and time we are assigned to present ourselves in person, and to have our fingerprints scanned into the abyss that is our government at work. I couldn’t help but think, as my fingerprints were taken for the third time along this process, that my future career as a spy was all but crushed.

So, our biometrics a.k.a. ‘scanning your fingerprints into the abyss’ appointment was yesterday. Before we went, I was quite intimidated about the event. Whenever you think ‘immigrations’ you conjure up images of officers in sunglasses with a toothpick hanging out of their mouth, wielding a large gun in one hand and a leash to a barking dog in the other. It also didn’t help that the appointment came with a lot of rules: Must show up for your assigned date and time; Will not be admitted to building without formal letter stating your appointment; No cell phones allowed in building; No one but applicants allowed in building… but actually it turned out to be very docile.

It is a run down office in the middle of a strip mall, nestled between an UPS store and some other non-descript place of commerce. The windows are blocked out, so you cannot see in or out. The walls are a baby blue so light it could be just tinted white; and the only things on the walls are a poster proclaiming “Welcome to the United States!”, a wrinkled picture of Pres. Bush slapped up in a plexiglas poster frame, flanked by two other smaller pics of unknown-to-me-but-they-must-be-important old white men. In the first waiting room we were entertained by ‘The Young and the Restless’ playing on a fuzzy tv with rabbit-ears, the second waiting room / fingerprinting room / really just the other side of the same long room we were kept quiet by the ‘Tyra Banks’ show playing on another tv. Welcome to America, indeed!

It was really quite an odd experience. I know the government loves to spend money on itself… and I have been in enough city halls / government centers / police departments lately to know they are nothing fancy but they are at least adequate - but this was… odd. As we sat nestled between people of all cultures hoping for a life in America, and others whom I can only assume were fellow international adoptive parents, in this strange eclectic room with a wrinkly G.W. staring down from above, I couldn’t help but think -how surreal.

I’m thinking next time we should try it on acid.