Bogota Blogger

Not easy.

Colombians can visit something like 30 countries in the world without visas, and most of those are Latin American countries or obscure island ones, with a few exceptions (Israel, South Korea, Japan). Colombians can’t even visit Mexico without a visa, and Mexican visas are hard to obtain, because–my cynical theory–the US dictates to Mexico their visa policy because we don’t want any of those Colombians getting closer to our border and trying to come into our country to take what we got!

There are websites for companies who supposedly help people get visas to places like Canada or Europe, but I think many of them are not too trustsworthy and that the best way is to find out through research the policies and procedures and just do it yourself. Visas for Colombians are harder and harder to come by to first world countries, so most of those agencies can’t help so much in the end anyway. A program to study English in Canada or England is probably one of the easiest routes to a visa, but even that requires a lot of work and, honestly, a lot of cash (and a few connections).

So, I last year helped my Colombian friend Jose try to get a visa to go to England to study English. He had a friend who had a connection with a language school in London, and we started there. Then, since the school works with the British Council, all the paperwork collection and documentation was supervised by that agency. The good part was that the British Council knows what the government wants to see and tells the people working with them what to gather in order to present a case. Basically it comes down to studying fulltime (21 hours per week) for at least seven months, with the course and a month of accomodation paid for in full up front, proof of a long-standing Colombian job, ability to pay living expenses in UK, property ownership, and lots of other detailed stuff.

 Getting Paperwork Together

It took a lot of time and money to get everything lined up, and with the incredible amount of effort and time spent waiting in lines in Colombia to get seals and signatures verified, it was probably 100 hours worth of work, at least. But, the part that sounded fair to me (and quite the opposite of the MO of the United States embassy) is that the paperwork case, once submitted, would be evaluated  by a computer in order to increase impartiality, and the answer would come in under a week.  Contrast this to the US, where an embassy employee makes a seemingly arbitrary decision that might or might not include an actual evaluation of the case, and the applicant might wait several months just to get an appointment.

Here’s a list of the types of documents that needed to be gathered and submitted:

1. Passport and other ID, of course

2. Birth certificate

3. A CV accounting for every month and year of life from birth till present

4. Proof of employment (longstanding is better)

5. Proof of property ownership

6. Bank statements

7. Paid-up course in London of at least 7 months duration

8. Paid-up housing in London for at least the first month

9. Documents, letters, etc. showing how life in London will be paid for

10. Airline reservation

11. Documentation from the school showing accepted courses of study

12. Copies of all diplomas, courses of study, etc. ever undertaken anywhere

And, of course, most of these documents required numerous seals and authentications, which in Colombia entails standing in numerous interminable lines and paying numerous fees to the sealers and authenticators. Then the authentications need to be authenticated (really!)

Finally, when we had it all together, it only took three days to get an appointment for submitting the paperwork, and about another three days to get an answer.  How nice is that???  And, it was even nicer that the answer was YES!

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 7th, 2007 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, The Colombian Way of Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.