Makeshift
Two weeks ago I went to Home Affairs to pick up my passport and visa extension only to find out that the application had been rejected for reasons unbeknownst to me and to the immigration officer who broke the news. Two things crossed my mind as I glared back at Christopher with a fading smile:
1. Well this is an interesting turn of events, and
2. … wtf?
Those weren’t very constructive thoughts and I sat there for a while, not really sure how to proceed. I asked him what my “options” were, and he told me I could either come back with a letter of appeal or with a plane ticket out of Uganda. I thought… well, appeal. But what exactly was I appealing? When I asked him why my application had been rejected, he just flipped slowly through my passport and shook his head, claiming he had not been given the reason and that the committee had simply decided to reject the application: “I can’t tell you, sometimes this happens. You have been here a month, that’s enough.”
The temperature rose a little bit when I demanded my passport back and he refused to give it to me without an outgoing plane ticket. I gave in, and walked out, without a passport, without a visa, without a clue, and with a flurry of emotions.
I’ve never been very lucky with visas.
I spent a sleepless weekend, mainly because my passport was sleeping without me in the Ministry of the Interior somewhere and partly because the power generator next to our first floor apartment decided to go off tirelessly for approximately 20 hours starting Sunday night at 11p.m. Take a dull anxious headache, add to that the cyclical sound of the gargantuan engine of a power generator intended to feed power to a dozen three bedroom apartments, and you’ve got yourself a slight state of exhaustion-and-stress-induced insanity. It’s a good thing I am well surrounded and well connected on this project; when James told me to bring my return ticket for August 15 to the Legal Affairs Office at 11 a.m. on Monday, the only last little glitch was having to scour the entire apartment for that return ticket, hidden so securely in Nathan’s locked room that I couldn’t find it anymore. Anxiety, exhaustion, power generator. You get the idea. This was not a revitalizing way to start my week.
But as Kapuscinski seemed to have put it so eloquently and accurately before, things get resolved just as quickly as they come undone in this part of the world. Go to Legal Affairs Office. Meet James’s friend. Sit on bench. Explain situation (though beyond “I applied for a visa extension and provided all the documents they asked for and it got denied and I don’t know why”, there wasn’t much more to explicate). Wait on bench. Share bad U.S. visa stories with James. Go to other bench. Wait. Talk to James about Kenya. Go to next bench. Sit. Wait. Get passport + visa + apology back.
Just like that. A weekend of unraveling. Behind me.
Neither James nor I really knows what happened and I could not tell you why I originally got denied. Beyond my sheer bad luck with customs issues, James’s friend explained this as an “oversight”. Apparently they thought I was trying to over-extend my stay. Which seems strange to me since I initially showed up for my visa extension two weeks before it expired, was told to come back on July 1st, the day of expiration, and came back on July 1st with all the required papers.
“Just think about how great this will be for your blog” were Jeremy’s words of consolation. And in a way, now that I have my passport and my visa and my smile back, I suppose he’s right.
1. Well this is an interesting turn of events, and
2. … wtf?
Those weren’t very constructive thoughts and I sat there for a while, not really sure how to proceed. I asked him what my “options” were, and he told me I could either come back with a letter of appeal or with a plane ticket out of Uganda. I thought… well, appeal. But what exactly was I appealing? When I asked him why my application had been rejected, he just flipped slowly through my passport and shook his head, claiming he had not been given the reason and that the committee had simply decided to reject the application: “I can’t tell you, sometimes this happens. You have been here a month, that’s enough.”
The temperature rose a little bit when I demanded my passport back and he refused to give it to me without an outgoing plane ticket. I gave in, and walked out, without a passport, without a visa, without a clue, and with a flurry of emotions.
I’ve never been very lucky with visas.
I spent a sleepless weekend, mainly because my passport was sleeping without me in the Ministry of the Interior somewhere and partly because the power generator next to our first floor apartment decided to go off tirelessly for approximately 20 hours starting Sunday night at 11p.m. Take a dull anxious headache, add to that the cyclical sound of the gargantuan engine of a power generator intended to feed power to a dozen three bedroom apartments, and you’ve got yourself a slight state of exhaustion-and-stress-induced insanity. It’s a good thing I am well surrounded and well connected on this project; when James told me to bring my return ticket for August 15 to the Legal Affairs Office at 11 a.m. on Monday, the only last little glitch was having to scour the entire apartment for that return ticket, hidden so securely in Nathan’s locked room that I couldn’t find it anymore. Anxiety, exhaustion, power generator. You get the idea. This was not a revitalizing way to start my week.
But as Kapuscinski seemed to have put it so eloquently and accurately before, things get resolved just as quickly as they come undone in this part of the world. Go to Legal Affairs Office. Meet James’s friend. Sit on bench. Explain situation (though beyond “I applied for a visa extension and provided all the documents they asked for and it got denied and I don’t know why”, there wasn’t much more to explicate). Wait on bench. Share bad U.S. visa stories with James. Go to other bench. Wait. Talk to James about Kenya. Go to next bench. Sit. Wait. Get passport + visa + apology back.
Just like that. A weekend of unraveling. Behind me.
Neither James nor I really knows what happened and I could not tell you why I originally got denied. Beyond my sheer bad luck with customs issues, James’s friend explained this as an “oversight”. Apparently they thought I was trying to over-extend my stay. Which seems strange to me since I initially showed up for my visa extension two weeks before it expired, was told to come back on July 1st, the day of expiration, and came back on July 1st with all the required papers.
“Just think about how great this will be for your blog” were Jeremy’s words of consolation. And in a way, now that I have my passport and my visa and my smile back, I suppose he’s right.
posted by cla at 12:30 PM
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