Visa problems and a rather big miracle

Our inital plan to move to the UK was June 21st after Sarah's girls camp. However, that has been delayed for a few months because of visa problems. The main reason our visa has been delayed is because the UK does not expedite Visas anymore because of the increase in Ukrainian immigrants to the UK. So instead of taking just 1 week for an expedited Visa, it could be now 2-3 months or even longer. In addition to that, before the visas can be processed, Rayspec, the company that Josh will be in charge of, needs to get a sponsor license to sponsor us. This has also been delayed, but there have been some amazing things that happened with that, for which we are very grateful:

The sponsor license process currently takes about 9-12 weeks. However, every day there’s a lottery where ten sponsorship applications are drawn randomly and they get processed first. Well, our immigration lawyers submitted for that lottery for us one time and we got it on that first try on May 30th!!

The lawyers were pretty stunned, because that has never happened to them before and with so many Ukrainian immigrants that seemed almost impossible. One week later, the sponsorship license was approved, and on June 27th we had our biometric screening in Salt Lake City, where they took our fingerprints and pictures to start processing our visas.

We shipped our passports and application to New York and now the waiting game starts. We were told it would take about 6 weeks for the visas to be processed, which will put our departure date around Aug. 11th. However, one thing is certain that nothing is set in stone, so we will see what happens with that. For now, we are extremely grateful that we won the lottery for the sponsorship license on the first try, since we hardly ever win anything!!

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