Summary of family visa application process for Kuwait

I just wrote an email to a new person who arrived and asked about the process of bringing his wife over. After I was done I thought...hey...this is a pretty good summary! This is it pasted verbatim:

Pretty much all of this depends on getting your Civil ID first. That can take 1-2 months from your arrival. After that it may take another 1-2 months depending on many factors (how fast you can get stuff done, government holidays, etc…). We were very blessed to be able to get it all done in about 2 1/2 months total, but I wouldn't expect that in every case.

The following list is overwhelming, I know. Let me give you some pointers before you go through the whole list:

- Concentrate on the next step
- Always double check what you think you need to do next with multiple sources.
- Don't be discouraged if you get conflicting information from different sources, use your best judgement and pick the most reliable one, then continuously check and recheck your choice at every opportunity.
- Things your wife can and should do *now*:
a) Start the authentication process (see below)
b) Contact the consulate (LA) or embassy (DC) to find out what their requirements for getting the visa info stamped into the passport will be.
c) Begin working on those requirements (i.e. medical exam/police background check)
- Things you can do now (without a civil ID):
a) Research cars and decide what you are going to do there (rent/lease/buy)
b) Research apartments/villas/etc… I was lucky and found the place I knew we had to be pretty quick, but I have some pointers on this if I were to do it again.
c) Depending on your requirements, you may decide it is better to hold off on these things and save money up til closer to when your wife gets here. I didn't do this, but others have, it's a personal preference thing.
d) Start saving as much money as you can towards the fees/postage you are going to have to pay at every step of the process.
- As a round figure, I would estimate that we've spent between $15,000 and $20,000 on total move costs. I had to pull a lot of cash over at times and was able to utilize a friend's local bank account and wire the money over. That's a lot of trust…if you have a better solution for moving lots of cash feel free to use it.

Ok, here's the big list. I have not detailed all the fees along the way. I think I do a better job (if haphazard and disorganized) of documenting that part in my blog entries.

1) Buy/lease/rent a car (this can be an adventure in itself)
2) Find your own place and move out
3) Start claiming your housing/car allowance from ITT (Notify Ish)
4) Authenticate marriage cert: Have your wife start on this ASAP.
a) Contact your State Authentication department and ask what is needed for them to authenticate a Marriage cert. They may direct you to a county first.
b) Get your marriage cert authenticated by the State.
c) Get your marriage cert authenticated by the State Department (federal level).
d) Send the authenticated doc to yourself in Kuwait.
e) Get your marriage cert translated (translators listed on kuwait US Embassy website)
f) Get your marriage cert authenticated by the US Embassy in Kuwait.
g) Get your marriage cert authenticated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs authentication department (you need a 5KD stamp before they'll do it)
5) Family Visa Application
a) Take the authenticated documents along with your Salary cert and work permit (just photocopy everything like 10 times) to the Ahmadi Immigration department (closest one). You'll need to go to a little building and ask for a family visa application (keep in mind this is all for the family visa, which means your wife can not work while here, I do not know about the other types of visas…). They'll type it up for you in arabic (make sure the english spelling of your wife's name is correct!). You then take this to a very hard to find office where a lady takes your papers and gives you an idea of when to come back.
b) When you come back, if everything is in order, you'll take these somewhere else in the same warren of buildings to have it stamped for expediting. BTW, you should be able to estimate by this time when you can expect to be able to bring her over, so you should be able to buy her ticket.
6) Send visa to Consulate or Embassy in the US
a) Then back to the same place you got the license authenticated and things got confusing for me, but eventually someone took me up to an office where they stamped something else and sent it as a fax to the Kuwaiti Consulate in LA (you can either send it there or to the Embassy in DC). This is to help speed the process up, otherwise I think you have to wait for them to mail it. Oh wait, I'm reading my blog again and am reminded that I had to get more "prints" of the visa. I ended up getting these somehow from the office in the Liberation Tower, but I think I may have been able to get them from any Immigration office (i.e. Ahmadi). It was just a simple typed up arabic printout of the visa I think. Maybe it was for faxing so it would transmit better? I dunno. Anyway, after I got that I went back to the authentication office and they did their thing and faxed it.
b) Found out that my wife needed to contact the Consulate and send them her passport, a medical checkup and a police background check. You should be sure to contact them ASAP to find out what exactly they need (it may have changed), and get your wife working on anything she can right now (i.e. checkup/background check). We didn't know about this til the last minute and were biting our fingernails to see if we could get it all done by the time she had to leave.
c) They (consulate/embassy) do something magic to the passport and send it back to your wife and she is now legally allowed to travel to Kuwait. Note that the visa provides for I think 2 months to contact the Immigration department and begin application for Residency and Civil ID (iqama). We decided to hire a local guy who works for KRH to do this part for us and are glad we did. It cost about 50KD per person (my son came over too) for his fee. The actual residency/insurance, etc… was much more.

For the Love of Corn

I mentioned a while back that I would be doing a post about corn and I finally got around to it. Jesse had mentioned something to me about corn stands before I got here, but he didn't describe them in any detail. I was picturing something like in Kenya where they roast maize on little fires by the side of the road. It's delicious and very, very cheap. Imagine my surprise when, come to find out, they are selling frozen corn emptied from a bag into a pot, heated up with butter and salt and a dash of lemon juice served in a small cup. It is also quite delicious but not at all cheap. Apparently, it's "rich kid food" so these stands are everywhere that kids might be and priced accordingly. It's especially shocking coming from a country where they have to invent new foods just to use up all the excess corn.

So just how expensive is this frozen corn? Let's do a little comparison. At IKEA they have the little food stand just beyond the cash registers, just like in the States. There they sell the corn, and also a chicken shwarma sandwich (picture a hot dog bun stuffed with chicken bits and seasoning, soooo good). The sandwich which contains actual meat and is really yummy will set you back 250 fils. The cup of corn? 400 fils! And this is IKEA so you know it's the cheapest corn you can find. 400 fils is about $1.50. The corn we have in the pictures is from the Science Center so I would imagine the price would be above average. It was 750 fils, which is about $2.75! For a cup of corn! I've been here for two months and I still haven't gotten over the shock.

Look! It's IT Joe!

And his little sidekick!

Jesse had to haul out his gear the other day so we had fun dressing up and taking pictures. Rowan almost couldn't stand under the weight of it.

Dusty Spring

I have to concur with Kerri, the weather lately has generally been awesome. Perfect temperatures, not too warm, not too cold. Sunny days, but not too bright. Flowers blooming in the desert, generally ebullant populace.

However, there is one aspect to the weather at this time of year that is not pleasant at all: Dust storms. Apparently, it's a bit worse than usual this year with at least 3 or 4 mild to strong dust storms in the past month or so.

Apparently, under the right conditions, the wind picks up the sand (which is very dusty here) and everything gets hazy...you get dust in your eyes, mouth, and any other orifice you care to imagine. The accumulation rate of dust on the floor and everywhere else quadruples. The worst I've seen it, it was so bad that you could barely see enough to drive, not that anyone slows down or anything. I actually stayed in the office during the worst case all day, not wanting to go outside and breath it. We were worried they would shut down the gates of the base and not let us go home (luckily that didn't happen).

But at least it's not hot yet...

In other news, the car had to go into the shop again. This time it was something in the transmission and was another 400 KD to repair. BMW parts are definitely spendy. But we are back up and running now.

Looking forward to this weekend which should be fun. Abu Khaled has invited us to go to Wafrah, a farming community in southern Kuwait to spend Saturday night. He said we'll have fun at a "jungle" and drink fresh camel's milk. This will be our first time out of Kuwait City and it's suburbs!

When It's Good, It's Very, Very Good . . .

I'm talking about the weather, of course. I need to write this post so I can look back on it in the summer heat and remember that there are times when I truely love the weather. I guess you could say we are now in Spring. They say it lasts from about mid-Feb to mid-March. I am trying to enjoy every moment of this wonderful weather because it really is amazing. It's too cold to swim, but it's perfect for just sitting outside and enjoying ones self. We don't need the air con, but we have all the windows flung open so the sound and smell of the sea is all around.

The pictures in the slideshow are of the walk we take to go into town. From our place we can walk to an area that has a mall (two really), a big grocery store, other department stores, tons of resturants, small shops and markets. We take this walk very often, of course. On the beach they have all kinds of rides and bouncy castles and such. Unfortunately they are only open in the evening so we haven't been able to go on any of them. The walk is very beautiful non the less and with this amazing weather there are lots of people about and the whole area has a nice family, community feeling about it.

I have to get off topic for a moment and relate a funny Rowan story. Our maid comes on Saturday evenings and Jesse and I go out and leave Rowan home with her. This Saturday when we came home, he showed me how she had cleaned his bathroom. I asked him if he had helped her clean and he said, "Well, not excessively. I just helped a little bit." Where does he come up with this stuff? I truely have no idea.