By Derry Kempf –
Over three years of planning and anticipating, oodles of correspondence to government offices here in the U.S. and in Ukraine, not to forget the thousands of dollars paid to and for the paper work expense to embassy officials and official documents, has finally resulted in getting Victor Parakhin and his family to Hamilton, Montana.
Victor is now the full-time preacher for the Hamilton Church of Christ, located at the end of Adirondac Street. The congregation welcomed Victor and his family when they arrived at midnight on April 15 at the Missoula airport. Victor took the reigns immediately on April 17 to start his preaching assignment and will continue for as long as needed.
An invitation is extended for all to attend the Sunday services at 11 a.m. to get a first-hand insight of Victor’s unique delivery and some comparisons of family life in Ukraine and the new life the Parakhins are happy to enjoy in America, especially the Bitterroot valley.
The long and arduous process for hiring Victor Parakhin, a Ukrainian citizen, as pastor of the Hamilton Church of Christ began in March of 2008 when a committee of the church congregation decided to contact Parakhin to see if he would consent to coming to Hamilton. After contacting him and hashing out the details, on May 13, 2008, the Hamilton Church of Christ sent to the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine a formal letter of invitation for the hiring or Victor Parakhin as the pulpit minister for the Hamilton Church of Christ. This letter was sent via U.S. Mail to Ukraine. After a month and no sign that the letter had been delivered, a second letter was sent via Federal Express. After several weeks of waiting, the original letter arrived before the Fed Ex one did.
Once the process started, the church committee was informed that certain fees in the amount of $2000 had to be paid for the Parakhins’ (Victor, wife Natasha, and sons Daniel and Alex) passports and medical exams before any other actions could be taken.
The next hurdle was that the Department of Homeland Security required a Form 1-360 to be filed before the State Department could issue work visas to come to the U.S. This 5-page document had to be accompanied by a $375 filing fee, and this resulted in receiving a Form 1-797 which consisted of about 10 pages of documentation for both Victor and the church that had to be furnished for the process to proceed. This was filed in September 2009, and the church was finally notified of approval from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service of the Department of Homeland Security on May 21, 2009, over a year after initiating the effort to recruit Parakhin.
The USCIS was supposed to forward the approval to the State Department so that they could get to work on issuing the exit visas for Victor and his family. Somewhere along the way the paperwork was never submitted to the State Department and the USCIS was of no help in locating the originals or resubmitting the approval. On October 16, 2009, the church then contacted an immigration lawyer who agreed to help in the matter, and the lawyer was officially retained the next month. In January 2010, the church was informed that the National Visa Center of the State Department had finally received the paperwork from the USCIS.
This generated another flood of documentation, mostly from Parakhin, and with the help of the lawyers this paperwork was finally completed, but it took almost another year to fulfill all of the requirements the NVC required, including a background check from Russia, which Ukraine is not even a part of anymore. Another $1600 was paid in fees for processing the visas.
Finally, on December 8, 2010, the church was notified that Victor and his family were to meet with the NVC on January 24, 2011for their interview and issuance of visas. After the interview, the visas were issued and on March 31, 2011, Victor and his family departed Ukraine, spent a couple of weeks with friends in Georgia, and arrived in Missoula on April 15, 2011.
After this three-year ordeal, the congregation is ecstatic to finally have Pastor Parakhin at the helm. “There was so much red tape and paperwork to go through,” says Derry Kempf, a member of the committee. “We were so pleased to finally meet them and to welcome Victor as our full-time preacher.”
The Parakhins are fluent in English and have said that the weather in Ukraine is a lot like Hamilton. They invite everyone to attend a service at the church.
“We are a friendly congregation here,” says Parakhin. “You are all most welcome.”