A Photograph and Two Fingerprints
Let me begin by apologizing for not posting anything yesterday. I had some time set aside for blogging but it was taken up by a soccer game I didn't know I was playing in until an hour before and a spontaneous trip to see some friends. My bad.
Anyway, this post is related to some thoughts I had today as I made my trip to the Mexican Consulate in Salt Lake City.
Here we go.
Reminder: I am scheduled to depart on an LDS mission on December 5th, 2017, for the Mexico Ciudad Juarez Mission. I've had to do a lot to prepare for this event, and today I had an appointment to finish up some of the legal stuff.
In order to serve a mission in Mexico, you have to get a visa to live in the country for an extended period of time. So, scheduled by the church, I had an appointment today to appear at the Mexican Consulate downtown with the purpose of obtaining this visa which would allow me to travel to Mexico as planned.
Let me say here that I haven't traveled very much in my life. Not that I wouldn't like to (I want to travel more than just about anything else) but I just haven't necessarily had the opportunity to travel very much. Specifically, I've never been out of the country. Until recently, I didn't have a passport and didn't really understand a lot about international travel (and I guess I still don't) so maybe everything I say here is going to be really boring to you but it's pretty much brand new to me
So at around 12:30 today, I set out. This was later than I had intended to leave for my 1:00 appointment but if you know me at all you'd know that I'm not very good at being on time to things. I ended up arriving ten minutes early at the consulate, but I was definitely worried for a minute that I might not make it in time for one reason or another.
The consulate, it turns out, is located towards the top of a fairly small, tan building. It is not beautiful but it looks official. I glanced up at words CONSULADO DE MEXICO on the building as I walked in, slightly worried that something might go wrong and the visa might not work out.
I didn't know very much about what I should expect during this appointment. Again, I had no experience in what it requires to get a visa and the information the church gave me was little more than what to wear, where to park, and that I might get asked questions like why I was going to Mexico and what I was going to do while I was there.
Questions??? I worried that even though I knew the answers to these questions and the answers are perfectly acceptable and good that somehow I might say something wrong and not be allowed to travel to Mexico as I intend to.
Regardless, I continued in. I walked down a hallway and came to a crossroads. I didn't see any signs notifying me where to go so I took a guess. I walked to the right and found myself in a room that I can describe as reminding me a lot of the DMV except that the people being helped at the stations around the walls were all blocked from my vision by large black screens.
Weird, I thought.
But I pressed on, hoping that I would find someone that could help me. In this process, I found another kid about my age also at the consulate to get a visa for his mission. Neither of us knew where to go, so we asked a security guard near us where we should go for mission visas. He kindly lead us to a small room where about a dozen other men about our age and a couple women were sitting.
This eased my worries a little bit. I had imagined that I would have a one-on-one visit with a consulate representative and for whatever reason this scared me, as if this representative would find any reason to not let me get a visa.
So I sat in this room and waited for more instructions. The only things in the room were some chairs and a desk where a woman was working at a computer, the desk cluttered by stacks of documents and passports, bundled presumably for each person who was sitting with me. I talked to the kid next to me, who departs for the Mexico MTC the same day as I do, but is going to a different mission.
After a small bit of waiting, the woman called up the person whose bundle of documents was at the top of the stack. He went up and was told to sit in the chair adjacent to the desk, where a camera was pointed. After entering some things in the computer, the woman took a picture of the man and then she scanned the fingerprints on his index fingers.
"All right, you're done." She said.
The rest of us in the room kind of looked around at each other, confused that that's all we were here to do. "That's it?" we asked collectively.
"Yep!" the woman said.
So, after waiting for a few more people to be called up, it was my turn. I went up, had a picture taken, and got my index fingers scanned.
And that was it.
So I drove home. This whole thing took a little over an hour out of my day, including about 40 minutes of just driving.
And so then I started thinking about travel, specifically international travel. Maybe this is just me, but I think it's so weird that humans have divided up the world into different sections they call "countries" and then decided that you can't cross from one section to another (legally) without paperwork and endorsements saying that you can.
I think that borders are the funkiest things ever. Of course, in order to exist as a nation you need to have borders that say how far your laws, governance, and other influence go. People divided the world into different nations because of differences in ideologies, the need to expand for increases in population, the results of conquests, or even simply because they didn't want to be identified with another group. Whatever the reason, each nation exists in the world today because at some point in time a person or a group of people came together and just said that it should.
Not that the idea of countries is a bad thing, necessarily. Countries have many advantages like uniform ideals and expectations and fair treatment to citizens of the country. Cultures develop and evolve inside countries and countries provide individuals with an automatic group at birth; a people that they can identify with and relate to.
So what I'm trying to say is that countries in general are very cool and helpful systems in the world, but I also think it's so weird that someone just drew a line in the sand one time and now you can't cross that line to their side because you were born on other side of it. Unless, of course, you go through a process to allow you to. Nations are like the ultimate gated community. You can't experience the inside of the place unless you find out the code that opens the gate.
But what's frustrating to me is that the code to this gate is more easily accessible to some people than others. Like all I had to do today was give a photograph and two fingerprints and I will likely be allowed to travel to a foreign country quite soon (I must provide a small bit of additional information here. These items are not all I had to submit in order to gain my visa. I had previously filled out some paperwork relating to the visa and submitted that, along with my passport, to the Church, who then gave these items to the consulate. I know that a picture and a fingerprint do not give you access to a foreign country. Please read on.).
There are people out there that would be better suited in a different place than they are but they can't get there because of legal obstacles. I think it's totally ridiculous.Why do they not get to go wherever they want on this rock of ours? It's so weird.
And I know. The same institutions that provide these legal obstacles are also the same institutions that allow you better opportunities in one place than another. They set the rules, and it's not always fair to everyone.
Also, I know that I, a person who has never traveled more than 2,000 miles from his home and who has never left the country he was born in, am not an expert on countries or borders or laws or visas or anything related to any of this. It just seems so strange to me that we can say to someone, "Feel free to travel wherever you want in your borders but you can't legally exist in ours."
A big thing that a lot of politicians in the United States today (specifically the goof sitting in the Oval Office) have been talking a lot about lately is immigration (specifically illegal immigration), which is a valid and important thing to talk about. But what I find wrong about all of their conversations is that they tend to assume that people who come here without following the proper legal procedures do so with the intent to do harm. Are there people who could potentially provide danger to the country or its citizens if they were allowed to come here? Yes. But (and maybe I'm too trusting of people, sorry) I would like to believe that the majority of people who seek to live in the United States (or for that matter, in any country that is not the one they currently live in) do so with the plan to live, to thrive, and to contribute to society as a whole. The government tends to view people who want to immigrate here as problems waiting to happen.
I choose to view them as people, waiting for their chance to live the American Dream.
I just wish the gated community I live in could be a little more open-minded about the lines they drew in the sand.
See you tomorrow.
Anyway, this post is related to some thoughts I had today as I made my trip to the Mexican Consulate in Salt Lake City.
Here we go.
Reminder: I am scheduled to depart on an LDS mission on December 5th, 2017, for the Mexico Ciudad Juarez Mission. I've had to do a lot to prepare for this event, and today I had an appointment to finish up some of the legal stuff.
In order to serve a mission in Mexico, you have to get a visa to live in the country for an extended period of time. So, scheduled by the church, I had an appointment today to appear at the Mexican Consulate downtown with the purpose of obtaining this visa which would allow me to travel to Mexico as planned.
Let me say here that I haven't traveled very much in my life. Not that I wouldn't like to (I want to travel more than just about anything else) but I just haven't necessarily had the opportunity to travel very much. Specifically, I've never been out of the country. Until recently, I didn't have a passport and didn't really understand a lot about international travel (and I guess I still don't) so maybe everything I say here is going to be really boring to you but it's pretty much brand new to me
So at around 12:30 today, I set out. This was later than I had intended to leave for my 1:00 appointment but if you know me at all you'd know that I'm not very good at being on time to things. I ended up arriving ten minutes early at the consulate, but I was definitely worried for a minute that I might not make it in time for one reason or another.
The consulate, it turns out, is located towards the top of a fairly small, tan building. It is not beautiful but it looks official. I glanced up at words CONSULADO DE MEXICO on the building as I walked in, slightly worried that something might go wrong and the visa might not work out.
I didn't know very much about what I should expect during this appointment. Again, I had no experience in what it requires to get a visa and the information the church gave me was little more than what to wear, where to park, and that I might get asked questions like why I was going to Mexico and what I was going to do while I was there.
Questions??? I worried that even though I knew the answers to these questions and the answers are perfectly acceptable and good that somehow I might say something wrong and not be allowed to travel to Mexico as I intend to.
Regardless, I continued in. I walked down a hallway and came to a crossroads. I didn't see any signs notifying me where to go so I took a guess. I walked to the right and found myself in a room that I can describe as reminding me a lot of the DMV except that the people being helped at the stations around the walls were all blocked from my vision by large black screens.
Weird, I thought.
But I pressed on, hoping that I would find someone that could help me. In this process, I found another kid about my age also at the consulate to get a visa for his mission. Neither of us knew where to go, so we asked a security guard near us where we should go for mission visas. He kindly lead us to a small room where about a dozen other men about our age and a couple women were sitting.
This eased my worries a little bit. I had imagined that I would have a one-on-one visit with a consulate representative and for whatever reason this scared me, as if this representative would find any reason to not let me get a visa.
So I sat in this room and waited for more instructions. The only things in the room were some chairs and a desk where a woman was working at a computer, the desk cluttered by stacks of documents and passports, bundled presumably for each person who was sitting with me. I talked to the kid next to me, who departs for the Mexico MTC the same day as I do, but is going to a different mission.
After a small bit of waiting, the woman called up the person whose bundle of documents was at the top of the stack. He went up and was told to sit in the chair adjacent to the desk, where a camera was pointed. After entering some things in the computer, the woman took a picture of the man and then she scanned the fingerprints on his index fingers.
"All right, you're done." She said.
The rest of us in the room kind of looked around at each other, confused that that's all we were here to do. "That's it?" we asked collectively.
"Yep!" the woman said.
So, after waiting for a few more people to be called up, it was my turn. I went up, had a picture taken, and got my index fingers scanned.
And that was it.
So I drove home. This whole thing took a little over an hour out of my day, including about 40 minutes of just driving.
And so then I started thinking about travel, specifically international travel. Maybe this is just me, but I think it's so weird that humans have divided up the world into different sections they call "countries" and then decided that you can't cross from one section to another (legally) without paperwork and endorsements saying that you can.
I think that borders are the funkiest things ever. Of course, in order to exist as a nation you need to have borders that say how far your laws, governance, and other influence go. People divided the world into different nations because of differences in ideologies, the need to expand for increases in population, the results of conquests, or even simply because they didn't want to be identified with another group. Whatever the reason, each nation exists in the world today because at some point in time a person or a group of people came together and just said that it should.
Not that the idea of countries is a bad thing, necessarily. Countries have many advantages like uniform ideals and expectations and fair treatment to citizens of the country. Cultures develop and evolve inside countries and countries provide individuals with an automatic group at birth; a people that they can identify with and relate to.
So what I'm trying to say is that countries in general are very cool and helpful systems in the world, but I also think it's so weird that someone just drew a line in the sand one time and now you can't cross that line to their side because you were born on other side of it. Unless, of course, you go through a process to allow you to. Nations are like the ultimate gated community. You can't experience the inside of the place unless you find out the code that opens the gate.
But what's frustrating to me is that the code to this gate is more easily accessible to some people than others. Like all I had to do today was give a photograph and two fingerprints and I will likely be allowed to travel to a foreign country quite soon (I must provide a small bit of additional information here. These items are not all I had to submit in order to gain my visa. I had previously filled out some paperwork relating to the visa and submitted that, along with my passport, to the Church, who then gave these items to the consulate. I know that a picture and a fingerprint do not give you access to a foreign country. Please read on.).
There are people out there that would be better suited in a different place than they are but they can't get there because of legal obstacles. I think it's totally ridiculous.Why do they not get to go wherever they want on this rock of ours? It's so weird.
And I know. The same institutions that provide these legal obstacles are also the same institutions that allow you better opportunities in one place than another. They set the rules, and it's not always fair to everyone.
Also, I know that I, a person who has never traveled more than 2,000 miles from his home and who has never left the country he was born in, am not an expert on countries or borders or laws or visas or anything related to any of this. It just seems so strange to me that we can say to someone, "Feel free to travel wherever you want in your borders but you can't legally exist in ours."
A big thing that a lot of politicians in the United States today (specifically the goof sitting in the Oval Office) have been talking a lot about lately is immigration (specifically illegal immigration), which is a valid and important thing to talk about. But what I find wrong about all of their conversations is that they tend to assume that people who come here without following the proper legal procedures do so with the intent to do harm. Are there people who could potentially provide danger to the country or its citizens if they were allowed to come here? Yes. But (and maybe I'm too trusting of people, sorry) I would like to believe that the majority of people who seek to live in the United States (or for that matter, in any country that is not the one they currently live in) do so with the plan to live, to thrive, and to contribute to society as a whole. The government tends to view people who want to immigrate here as problems waiting to happen.
I choose to view them as people, waiting for their chance to live the American Dream.
I just wish the gated community I live in could be a little more open-minded about the lines they drew in the sand.
See you tomorrow.
