Identification Document

My passport, unlike the travel document from other countries is a handwritten one. It was issued in 2003 in Singapore and in the expiry date column, the date 17 January 2006 was written neatly in blue ink. (The extended date is found on pages that follow after).

Most of the 39 pages in the book has been stamped or has visa stickers in them. In the past couple of years, I have spent long hours on the net, filling out visa forms, and at embassies queuing for visa approvals - Vietnam, Maldives, Malaysia, Australia, UK, US, South Africa, South Korea, etc. And yesterday evening, it was the first time I had to get visa at the airport, and I knew that if the immigration officer didn't approve, my 6 months of preparations to Kenya would be down the drain.

At the Kenyan International Airport, I waited anxiously for the officer to look through my passport. They brought that little red book, from counter to counter, typing into their computer screens, speaking to each other in Swahili, a language I will be learning in a couple of weeks, granted the visa gets approved.

I did a brief run through of the Plan B senario, in case the visa was not approved. (I have been denied of admission to Malaysia twice before). If I wasn't here in the hostel where the 23 students are accomodated for the orientation, I would probably be on the plane to Singapore. I counted the number of days to school reopening: about 14 days. That would give me enough time to buy a ticket, send emails out to the administration and professors to let me into classes, because the semester abroad didn't go through.

Thankfully, I didn't have to explore plan B further. I got a 3 month visa in the country and I am now on my way to learning Kenya, its socieity and the trajectory of development work here.

But at times, I wonder if it would be a good choice, if I had tried to get a citizenship of another country. Frankly speaking though, I am not really a citizen of Burma/Myanmar. I have a foreign identification there, because my mom was born to Chinese immigrants in the country is not granted a Burmese nationality. So I am a phu (foreign born) in Burma, a permanent resident in Singapore, and a person with a student visa in the US; in other words... a stateless citizen?