Wondering how to apply for a temporary resident visa to Mexico as a person of colour in a “third world country” (Kenya) as a citizen of a different third world country (India)? Buckle up! This guide will lay out the dos and donts, with detailed instructions on how best to avoid rejection. Failing that, it will remind you your place in the world.

Shed your self-respect

This is the most important step in this (and any) visa application process. Find a small cardboard box (A dirty shoebox will do) and place your self-respect and expectations of civility and equality in it. If it’s been a while since your last visa application, your self-respect may have regrown and it may be hard to fit it in the box. You can reclaim your self-respect from the box when the visa process is done, but it’s best if you just throw away the box.

Read the visa rules carefully

Go to the consulate website and read the visa page. Take care to note the requirements for your type of visa. In case of the temporary resident visa, the consulate requires

• Proof of residency in the country you’re applying from
• Bank account statements for the last six months

Double-check with the consulate

Just to be sure you don’t get your hopes up of getting a visa after reviewing the website, contact the consulate, stating the visa you’re interested in and confirming the documents you plan to apply with. This will almost certainly be met with an automated reply linking you to the very website you got all the information from but if you’re lucky, you might get a passive-aggressive response from a human linking you to the website instead! 😍

This is a good reminder to temper your expectations and practise stoicism - remember, nothing in this world is for sure, not least the possibility of your getting a visa despite meeting all the requirements.

You want privacy? What are you, a terrorist?!

Take a stab in the dark, and send an email to the consulate with all your documents and ask if they’re in order. You may not know who (or how many people) have access to the email, but it doesn’t matter - people who have nothing to hide don’t expect their bank statements and the personal transactions they contain to be private. Privacy is for other people who distinctly don’t look like you.

Expect the unexpected

You didn’t think that the requirements you saw on the website would be everything, did you? No, of course not. You know better than that - There are always hidden requirements! It would be no fun if consulates listed out all of them on their websites or responded to your emails/phone calls with the real list of requirements.

I followed the requirements on the website and emailed the consulate a bank statement for the last six months, generated by the online statement generation tool of my international bank (Standard Chartered) only to be told that I need to submit a statement for the last twelve months. Surprise!

What if you switched banks eight months ago and cannot obtain a bank statement from your previous bank? No problem, the consulate has you covered - Just submit a letter from your employer instead, as well as your payslips for the last six months. Just to be sure that you’re not making up an entire organization, its payroll system, contact information, and address, make sure to include the passport bio-data page of the person who signs the letter confirming that you work for the organization. Easy peasy!

Strengthen your bond with your boss

You may not have read this in your run-of-the-mill “How to be a manager” book, but the true sign of a healthy relationship with your manager is having a copy of their passport bio-data page! After all, nothing says “I trust you” than sharing personal IDs with your reports.

I reached out to my boss and explained my predicament and how I was running out of time before some upcoming travel plans that would take me out of Kenya, and in the course of a day, she shared a signed letter with the organization letterhead stating my job role and tenure at the org, as well as my salary and her passport details. She also included a photo of passport bio-data page! In unrelated news, my current role at Maisha Meds has been the longest of my career.

Embrace radical candour

Think you’re an open book? Consulates have a new free service to aid you in your journey towards simple, transparent living - Doxxing your salary!

Remember that signed letter from my boss, with the organization letterhead? It contained an email. A public-facing email address that we share with external parties, which forwards all emails to five people across the org. See where I’m going with this?

To make sure that I did not make up an organization, payslips from the org, a signed letter from my boss and a photo of her passport, the consulate decided to contact that public email address. It included my payslips for the last six months in the very first email and asked for verification.

Understandable, really. You can never be too sure of the legitimacy of documents these days.

Encryption, you say? Stamps and signatures on paper are the true sign of security

Speaking of legitimate documents, don’t forget to get your bank statements and your payslips doodled on beautified bedazzled certified by professionals - bank managers and your org’s finance team respectively. Everyone knows that even a truly hardened criminal who has found a way to forge the bio-data page of a passport and set up a fake organization website and Google Workspace to intercept emails sent to its public-facing email address to confirm the legitimacy of their payslips cannot crack the certification rubberstamps of a bank.

To the consulate’s credit, it always referred to “certified bank statements” and “certified payslips”, but I did not pick up on that until it was explicitly flagged, in the seventh round of correspondence with the consulate. No problem though, all it took was a visit to a bank branch and reaching out to my very accommodating mostly-remote colleague who, recognizing the limited time I had to get a visa before my travel, invited me to drop by their house with printouts of my payslips so they could quickly sign the documents. Download a scanner app, take photos of a lot of pages adorned with signatures and stamps and voilà, certification complete!

Practise patience

So you’ve submitted all your documents, and the consulate has finally confirmed that they’re all in order, but there has been radio silence since then. Time for another reminder that the only thing you can control in this world is your mind (and some of us need medication to have some semblance of control). Never mind that it has been more than a month since you established contact with the consulate. Or that you only have two weeks before your travel plans that will keep you out of the country for a month.

Don’t even think about emailing the consulate informing them that you don’t live in Nairobi, the city the consulate is located in, and that you would appreciate their accommodating a visa appointment before your upcoming travel plans. Not unless you want a generic response with a link and a quote from the website stating that the processing of documents can take up to 10 days from the submission of all documents. This time, the word on the website is the law.

Know your priorities

What would you do if a consulate emails you at 1pm informing you that your appointment had been scheduled for 9am the following day? If you answered, “I’d emphatically accept and show up the next day, because I’d put the rest of my life on hold for the visa appointment anyway”, you are clearly a person who has accepted your place in the world. I had not, especially as I had already travelled to Rwanda at the time, so I replied that “9am tomorrow would not work for me” and requested an appointment at the end of March, when I expected to be in Nairobi for a few days.

Are we sure that samsara is not about obtaining a visa?

Maybe Lumbini had restrictive visa policies?

After following up a second time, the consulate wrote back to inform me that my visa appointment had been scheduled for the first week of April. You’d think seeking an appointment a full 25+ days in advance for the end of March would ensure that appointments were still open and you’d be able to get the date that works best for you (hard to imagine a clamour among folks in Kenya to travel to Mexico), but it is not your allotment in life to question the decisions beyond your control. Well, maybe sometimes it is, as I did, asking if the consulate could accommodate my preference for end of March. It worked - I was informed that my appointment had been set for the date I requested.

Was it that simple, you ask? No, of course not. The consulate informed me that because my visa appointment would be a full month after the date it had initially set for me, I would need to submit fresh bank statements and payslips. All certified of course.

Will this ever end?

We’re getting there, I promise. Long story short, I made it to my appointment with freshly signed and stamped payslips and bank statements, passport copies, signed letter from my employer (needed a new one, just in case I’d been fired in the month since I’d last emailed the consulate), visa application form, passport photos in a specific dimension (which weren’t needed in the end because a digital photo was taken at the consulate instead).

After two in-person visits to the consulate and additional documents to prove my “economic solvency”, I finally got a shiny temporary resident visa sticker in my passport!

I hope I’ve demonstrated how easy it is to apply for this visa! All it takes is a little bit of patience.

After two years of (mostly) staying put in Kisumu, I’m getting back on the road!

Of all the places in the world, I would not have guessed that I’d break my nomadic streak for life in Kisumu. I’m glad to have spent all this time in the slow pace of a small city - definitely dodged the intense lockdowns around the world.

Things I’ll miss from my life in Kisumu

• walking down the quiet Okore Road or Ridoch Road as the sun sets and the heat of the day lets up

• cycling or running along the Lake Victoria shore in the direction of Dunga beach, noticing the water hyacinths surrendering or gaining turf as the “seasons” change.

• grabbing a booth and working from Java House at West End Mall in the afternoons - Going to Java was the one COVID risk I allowed myself for the sake of keeping my sanity and having a reason to get out of the apartment. Debatable if I held on to my sanity, but it became such a comfort that I’d visit Java at least once a week, and get one of the few vegan/vegatarian options in the menu, so much so that the waiters knew exactly what I’d get. “Green smoothie and a garden salad?”. All I had to do was nod.

• the stunning views of the hills around Kisumu - I was lucky to be in a fifth floor apartment, and seeing the orange and purple hues of dawn over the hills was an experience.

• the one-hour (minimum) wait times at most restaurants and how it teaches you to embrace Kisumu’s quirks and work with it - I’d call in my order an hour in advance and would have to wait only 5 - 10 minutes when I got there 😛

• rushing to Chandarana/Food Plus before closing time for groceries that cannot be found elsewhere in Kisumu (hummus, kombucha, vegan pesto/ice cream/wine, fresh tofu)

• being accosted by the same group of boda drivers outside West End Mall who know exactly where to drop you off, all jostling to be the one to make 50 shillings. I’ve been told that real Kisumu folks pay only 20 shillings to go to most places, but 50 is the minimum price for foreigners.

• the long rains - the howling winds, the lightning storms over the lake, the sheer intensity of rain.

• the dodgy instant electric heaters - Can you really say you’ve lived life on the edge if you haven’t showered under an electric showerhead that instantly heats water, as you contemplate high-voltage electrocution and bodies charred beyond recognition? Just kidding, this probably belongs in the next section.

• the elaborate greetings. As someone familiar and very comfortable in the brusque, utilitarian, seemingly rude (by Western standards, not mine) ways of urban Indian customer service at grocery stores, and small shops and restaurants, the social ritual of greeting absolutely everyone before engaging with them initially drove me crazy (So inefficient). This is a real transcript of a phone call from an unknown number

  Me: "Hello?"
  Person: "Hello, how are you?"
  Me: "I'm fine, how are you?"
  Person: "I'm fine too"
  *Awkward pause
  Me: "Yes?"
  Person: "I'm calling you from DHL. There is a package at our office...."
  

  But now? Kisumu has done a number on me. I was in India briefly last year, and I got strange looks because I started all interactions with “Hi, how are you?”

• making small talk with a stranger and discovering that they run a “ministry” on weekends and collections have been down in recent months. The odds that that has happened to me 2 - 3 times!

• watching the sunset in the weirdly segregationist, melanin-free environs of Dunga Hill Camp on a Friday night, and greeting folks whom you’ve only ever seen with a bottle of beer in their hands (and presumably not their first for the evening). Alcoholism is a real thing, Kisumu!

• taking a boda to the airport, and catching your flight even when you get to the airport 15 minutes before takeoff.

Things I won’t miss

• The garbage burning and the filthy air (sometimes)! Don’t get me started (I’ve written about it before).
• The drunk-driving! If you see someone driving past midnight on a Friday, I promise you they’re not sober. It blew my mind when I learnt that drunk-driving was just the norm in Kisumu.
• Maybe it’s just me and my complete lack of social media and/or social skills, but it felt like there was absolutely nothing to do in Kisumu but to go to church or drink to get hammered. At this point in my life (and, I hope, always), I don’t need someone shouting at me that “the fiery depths of hell await you for your sinful ways” in the hope of scaring me into committing to a tithe, nor do I want to run away from an existential crisis by numbing my mind with alcohol (I prefer travelling, i.e, literally running away, instead). That meant..spending a lot of time reading and watching stuff online. And resentfully finding meetup.com and Alliance Française events in Nairobi
  • That said, I’m leaving with a tinge of regret that I didn’t use my time in Kisumu to travel to the places around it. I’ve been learning more about permaculture and natural farming lately, and after spending days trying to find a permaculture farm accessible to me that would be willing to give me a tour, I found one an hour’s drive away from Kisumu 🤦. I also don’t feel like I’ve seen much of Kakamega and beyond, not to mention Mount Elgon National Park!
• The madenning chorus of church loudspeakers on the weekends, starting as early as 8AM and stretching all the way to about 6PM.

Exciting times for Kisumu

I’m cautiously optimistic about all the upcoming changes in Kisumu - A waterfront promenade is under construction, the Kisumu port is being revived, many parts of the city have been spruced up and new bicycle lanes created in preparation for the Africities summit in a few months, and the colonial-era train is finally functional again, if your definition of functional accommodates a train that averages about 20 km/h and takes 12 hours from Nairobi to Kisumu.

Depending on how the election in August ~is decided~ goes, the next President may have strong ties to Kisumu - Hopefully that translates to a greater focus on the region, if only for the purposes of voter appeasement.

What’s next?

I’m looking forward to doing a bit of travelling - Yes, it’s inconvenient to look up COVID restrictions and take PCR tests, but after a long time in Kisumu, the scale has tipped in favour of travelling despite the inconveniences. I feel silly that I haven’t seen much of east Africa in all this time in the region, so I have Rwanda on my mind.

What I’d really like from this year is to find a small house on a permaculture farm, in a part of the world with a mild climate, spending hours outdoors everyday, working on the farm alongside people willing to teach me their farming practices and put up with my remote work, somewhere I can go cycling or wandering off every weekend.

We buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like.
– Piotrkowska Street, Łódź

I’m Indian, and my girlfriend is Polish. We love travelling and we’d like to visit a lot of places, but there are surprisingly few countries that I can visit without a visa. Getting a visa can be tedious. (Quite often, I’ve had to personally visit consulates and submit bank account statements, travel insurance and cover letters along with my visa application form). Finding countries that allow both of us to visit without a visa or obtain a visa on arrival is hard. That’s why it occurred to me to build Nomad Couple, a website that provides information on visa requirements for couples.

The site was built as an experiment with Angular2. I set up the repo using angular-cli, a wonderful tool that makes it easy to build an Angular2 site and deploy it on GitHub Pages. Having spent some time in the “Javascript fatigue”-inducing React ecosystem, it’s refreshing to be able to set up a project and get going quickly with angular-cli. (Side note: It looks like Facebook is finally acknowledging how complex it is to get started with a React app by creating its own CLI tool).

At the moment, the site groups countries based on visa requirements and links to WikiVoyage pages. I’d like to provide more information on each country through multiple data sources, the abilitiy to add links and pictures, and a Disqus comments section.

The data for the site was scraped from Wikipedia’s “Visa requirements for X citizens” pages. The source code for the scraper is available here.