One traveled from the Crimean coast of Ukraine, the other from the south of Spain. One came for love, the other for knowledge. One spoke Russian, the other Spanish, but last month Olga Rigg and Celeste Delgado-Librero became citizens of the same country.

In separate ceremonies, Rigg, bookkeeper and accounts payable manager for the Sweet Briar bookshop, and Delgado-Librero, director of Junior Year in Spain, took oaths to become naturalized U.S. citizens.

Olga RiggRigg’s path to U.S. citizenship began in 1998 with an Internet hook-up – literally. For several months, she had been talking via e-mail with Dave Rigg, now Sweet Briar’s director of computer services. A romance blossomed and she invited him to Kiev for a visit.

“I invited him to visit me in my country, and I met him in Kiev,” the soft-spoken bookkeeper said. “We [toured] Kiev and after[ward] I brought him to my place in south of Ukraine in … Crimea, near the Black Sea.”

Dave met her family, toured the Crimea and as she puts it, “decided maybe they’d be a couple.”

After he flew home to the United States, Dave applied for a three-month fiancée visa. It was a long, cumbersome process. “I needed to make thousands and thousands of copies,” Rigg recalled, noting that she finally got her papers from the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw.

Papers in hand, Rigg traveled with her then-8-year-old daughter to Alexandria, Va., where Dave was living at the time. “Three months they gave me to make a decision,” she said. “If I liked it, I would stay. If I didn’t like it, I should leave [the] country. After a short period of time, three months, we made [a] decision.”

Since then, the couple married, she learned how to drive, and in 2004 she earned a degree from Sweet Briar. After having her green card for several years, she applied for citizenship. Travel would be easier, she said, and she also could bring her mother to the United States.

When asked if she felt bad about giving up her Ukrainian citizenship, Rigg quickly answered, “No,” adding that she was excited about the opportunities her new citizenship brought with it.

“I can vote, finally,” she said. “I can get a government job, but I’m happy with this one.”

For Delgado-Librero, becoming a U.S. citizen just made sense. She first came to the United States in 1991 as an exchange student and visiting assistant at Sweet Briar. She returned home briefly, but returned to America in 1992.

Celeste Delgado-Librero Since then, she has been based around or at Sweet Briar as an assistant professor and more recently as the director of JYS. “I think I decided that this is going to be where I live, this is going to be the country where I live, so it really made no sense not to have [U.S. citizenship],” she said of her decision to apply for naturalization.

It was a practical matter, really. Doors would open, travel would be easier, and she wouldn’t have to give up her Spanish citizenship, something which had not previously been an option. “I did not want to lose my Spanish and European citizenship because you have many possibilities there,” she said.

“[Also] I was considering taking a job in New Zealand for three years and being just a resident alien as they call us you had many restrictions on how long you could be away from the country and all that, so … it’s more a matter of convenience.”

When she began the naturalization process more than a year ago, Delgado-Librero – like Rigg – said her computer printer got a workout. “They had everything online, so I just printed out all this huge amount of paper that you have to read about the history of the United States and all that,” she said, holding her thumb and index finger about an inch apart for emphasis.

The exam was “fairly simple,” she said, including questions about Constitutional amendments and “Who is the governor of Virginia?”

“I had to read lots of things,” she said. “It was nice and interesting, but I was kind of scared. But then the exam was not really that difficult. … You take it in front of somebody and it takes about three minutes or something.

“It’s good they make you read all that stuff because if you don’t know it you should know it, but then it’s good that it’s not so difficult because you’re very nervous, and on top of that someone is looking at you, just in front of you.”

When asked if there is anything she’s looking forward to doing as a U.S. citizen, without hesitation Delgado-Librero said, “Vote! I want to vote! I don’t think I’ll run for office anytime soon and it’s a shame I can’t be President, which would be nice. I could fix it. Yeah, vote. I think it’s really important.”

— By Suzanne Ramsey, SBC staff writer