Getting There

Week 2

 

I’ve fallen asleep on the couch while waiting for John. John calls me to ask if I’m sleeping or waiting for him. I’m doing both. He tells me to go back to bed.

 

John and his brother, Jean Baptiste, arrive at the house at half past 3. Purveying the cloth sacks Charlene has stuffed with all her belongings, they cut down her luggage by half.  Scrambling to drag the bags back into John’s mother-in-law’s bedroom, Charlene still manages to add an additional 3 bag of uneaten vegetables, doughnuts, fried meat, and chips from the night before. John stops by Vanki’s house to settle bills and pass on the key.

 

Five hours later, we pull into the sleepy border town[1]. Jean-baptise yells something to a motorcycle driver, and gives 2,000 UGX to Charlene, who rolls out of the car onto the bike. We proceed with all her bags, to my utter confusion for a minute[2]. We pass through Ugandan immigration one by one and inch forward towards Congolese immigration. I’m pulled, unsurprisingly, into a backroom of the border crossing post, and told:

 

The embassy shouldn’t have taken my money and given me a visa.

Congolese visas should be issued by the person’s country of residence. Nevermind that I live in Jordan where there is no embassy. He doesn’t know what I should have done. I should return to Kampala and ask the embassy for my money back.

 

2 hours of arguing with the officer in French and I walk out to give john another turn[3]. Charlene and I take turns falling asleep at a cafeteria table and walking around Kasindi to stay awake. John buys us grilled fish, cassava leaf sauce, and ugali since we aren’t carrying any local currency[4].

 

Each time Charlene and I walk down the dusty, unpaved road, I’m irritated that Charlene wants to walk at all, given the attention given to us by truck drivers and a general sense of overstepping an invisible demarcation. 4 hours later, we find Jean-Baptiste has refused to leave our bags, eating the meat and chips in the tupperware. 6 hours later, connections from Goma and Kinshasa have intervened on my behalf. The officers stamp my passport. We take a taxi to beni as night falls. The drive to Butembo is almost entirely in the dark.

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[1] Congolese travelling from Uganda say that its better to travel through Uganda at night, meaning your journey through Congo will be during the daytime, in order to avoid any possible trouble on the road.

[2] The biker takes Charlene, who has no passport, on a dirt path through nearby fields to the other side of the border, where she waits patiently in the rental car. As John said, “She has no papers, so she has to leave Uganda the way she entered”. The mountainous Kivus in the east’s physical and human geography is usually categorized as part of the Great Lakes highlands, whereas almost 60% of the rest of the 905,000 sqaure miles of the country is covered with a thick tropical forest, making cross border monitoring nearly impossible.

[3] At this point, we think that the officer is trying to get a bribe from us. A common method to avoid or reduce paying bribes at checkpoints is talking about the alleged offense until the requisitioner is tired of explaining themselves.

[4] Its worth noting that we eventually realized that the new regulation requiring foreigners to apply for Congolese visas in their country of residence or citizenship were actual requirements, and that there is an online service for those residing in countries without embassies, which hadn’t shown up when I was searching for Congolese visa application instructions online. But a positive indicator, nonetheless, since the officer talking to us perservered in re-explaining himself patiently without asking us for a bribe in the end.