Passports and the Green Mamba

In Zim, everyone knows what a black mamba is.  It's a snake... And not just any snake, but a highly venemous, fast predator related to the cobra.  Here is the last time I (knowingly) crossed paths with one:

We pulled up to a parking lot and there it was, sitting between us and the store....  We went shopping elsewhere.

Now here is what most Zimbabweans refer to as "the green mamba":

The power of your passport can be a fascinating topic when you live abroad and suddenly realize there are number of perks that come with belonging to a certain passport club.  And a number of limitations if you don't... 

The passport is a funny thing.  Well, funny, that is, if you're an American.  In Zimbabwe, it's no laughing matter.  With the help of outspoken leadership and political pariahood, Zimbabwean passport holders have been seeing a lot of closed doors these days.  

The "green mamba," as Zimbabweans call it, stands as a symbol among many locals as a reminder that they are shut out of access to other countries, despite the languages they may speak or their ancestral backgrounds. As one of many examples, my friend -whose grandfather holds the key to a city in Great Britain, fought in their army, and was sent to Zimbabwe as part of his military duty- reminds me that she is being made to feel less and less welcome in her home country of Zim, where her rights are not systematically equal to that of every other citizen in the country. Yet, though she feels the government's pressure to push out those colonialist families who have now called Zimbabwe home for generations, she has no where else to go.  "All we can do," she once told me, "is teach our children to marry someone outside of the country! My husband and I say, 'Don't marry for love!  Find a good passport first!'" Though there is a humor in her speaking, there is also sadness. "We have nowhere else to go.  This is home, eh?  Whether they want us here or not." When times get tough in the country, citizens do not get the same options to move across borders as we Americans confidently have.

Most local Zimbabweans have their own stories. Some involve the limited number of times one can apply for a visa in a foreign country. Some involve getting all the way to the other country before being denied entry. Some involve having to show a great deal of money in  a bank account, as well as proof that one is returning back to Zim eventually with a job waiting for them. Some involve proving familial connections through documentation extending as far as turning in mortgage papers for the homes of in-laws in other countries. And all involve hours of running around and completing interviews to get the correct paperwork and approval stamps.

Visas for those citizens of Zim are an arduous, expensive, full time job to say the least.  As political climates ebb and flow, companies devoted entirely to getting locals visas in other countries are still learning how to jump through hoops decades into service. Travel and moving can be a tricky thing when no one will have you. 

Apparently nobody wants a green mamba knocking on their door....

To view this fascinating graphic up close, check it out at its source: http://awesome.good.is/infographics/how-powerful-is-your-passport/516

Normal but Bizarre Licenses: Radio

To remind you, we were talking about "normal but bizarre" in Zim.  To continue my explanation that started two days ago regarding licenses, here's a little reminder of where we left off:

In Zimbabwe, one must own a radio license if owning a car, and a television license if living in a home.  It does not matter if you actually own a radio or a television. You must have a license anyway. The problem is that when the tax-man or woman approaches you, the tax must be paid on the spot... immediately or the fine is sometimes up to four times greater than the actual tax and then the task of paying the fee involves police stations and standing in line at a number of department windows to get your name off "the list." The prospect of not paying is actually quite burdensome.

The car-radio license, though cheap, was a bother. Our car did not have a radio, but still showing an officer that at a police stop was no valid argument. We had to pay like everyone else.

At times you could purchase a six month license.  At other times, the country was only selling three month passes.  Always a person's car was checked for the sticker at police stops.  The licenses for car radios were sold in the post office (my one attempt took six hours of line-waiting before the office simply closed on the angering crowd and said we would have return another day) and large parking lots by random people with clipboards, able to give you a ticket for not having a license if you did not approach them first to ask to buy one.  Awesome.  The problem was, at times the country ran behind ("they ran out of money," the rumors always said) on printing the license stickers, so often a person could be looking for a license for months at a time, needing to know when they were suddenly available to purchase one and then doing so immediately before coming onto a police stop.

Such was just my luck last year, when I searched for a new radio license for over a month.  I pulled up to a police stop just two days after unsuccessfully scouting out a license.  The police officer spoke harshly to me, explaining that I could buy a license from him for thirty dollars, or receive a twenty-dollar fine plus then be obligated to buy a license before being able to drive again. Someone was making his own rules, but I bought the license there and went on my way.

A few short months later when we again needed to purchase a radio license, I decided to play it smart. I pulled up to a woman with a clipboard in the parking lot of a place called the Chase Shops and opened my window.  I requested two licenses, one for now, and one for three months later.  "That is not legal," she had told me. "The stickers on them say they are only good until April."

I thought for a moment and then clarified. "Yes, but it's already mid February.  So really I'm only buying one for the next month and a half?" A new license-seeking headache would start again before I knew it.

"It is not my problem that the licenses were not available until this week. You can also choose to not drive for a month and a half."

And this is how I spent my time in Zim.

Normal Yet Bizarre Licenses: Television

I am inspired by what my friend Beth, still in Harare, recently called a "normal yet bizarre experience" in Zim. Bizarre is true.  But I think I'd replace the word "normal" with "typical."

The experience is an example of a number of things:

-how one is kept busy in Zimbabwe running around to fulfill sudden, often changing, requirements,
-how the country tries to seem highly organized by charging taxes but then has no way to carry-out the system fairly or appropriately,
-how individuals doing official business often take the position as a blessing to make up their own rules and have their own little piece of power,
-and how people assume that if one owns something then that person must have a great deal of money at their fingertips.

What am I talking about? It's that time of year again... Beth recently had a run-in with the television license company and it gave me flashbacks of my own experiences dealing with this headache each January.

In Zimbabwe, one must own a radio license if owning a car, and a television license if living in a home.  It does not matter if you actually own a radio or a television (which we didn't during our last year). You must have a license anyway. The problem is that when the tax-man or woman comes a-callin' the tax must be paid on the spot.  One must pay immediately or the fine is sometimes up to four times greater than the actual tax, which makes for a hefty fee and a huge run-around to get one's name and address off the list of non-payers! But it's sort of a good luck, bad luck thing, as some years your street may be entirely forgotten by the tax collectors.

Last January when the gate rang and I picked up the speaker to see who it was, I was less than enthusiastic to find out it was a television tax collector for the ZBC (Zimbabwean Broadcasting Corporation). Okay; I'll admit it, I may have just tried to pretend I was the housekeeper and said that "Madam" was not home.

"The household will automatically receive the fine and a ticket then," I was told.

No dice.  I went out to the driveway to have a conversation over the fence.

As I stood on our gate box and looked over, I knew immediately from the fluorescent vest, receipt book, and clipboard, that the man was legitimate and ready to collect, immediately. After some back and forth about the fact that I did not have fifty dollars lying inside my house at the time, the man made it clear that the alternative was the fifty dollar license fee, a fifty dollar ticket to be paid at the police station, and a twenty dollar fee to be paid to him for having to write the ticket.  Hmm.  That was a new rule...

Zimbabwean citizens often assume that if one owns something or lives in a house then that person must have a great deal of money at their fingertips.  Because a large percent of the population does not use a traditional bank but instead carries their valuables on their body, it is expected that a person well off enough to own something requiring a license will always have money on hand.  I found this little assumption to be quite inconvenient a number of times, and always when talking about tickets and licenses.

When told I had no money lying around the house, the man suggested I drive him to my ATM. (Oh why was my husband never home at the right moment to deal with these things?!) I had to get the gardener, Shoman, from the back (on his day off, no less) and ask him to go in the car with me to feel a little safer as I took the tax collector to the bank.  (A beer is always promised for these kinds of things.)  The collector was very nice -albeit extremely inconvenient- until we returned home and I went to pay him. That's when he realized the machine had only given me hundreds.

"You expect me to have fifty dollars of change on me?!" he had guffawed in disbelief.

This from the man who expected me to have fifty on myself for a television I did not own when he was the one collecting money. I clenched every piece of my insides and thought for a moment.

This time Showman saved me; offering to walk the collector to the nearest set of shops to get him change.  I knew this would be incredibly difficult, as finding a person with two fifties would not be an easy thing.  Shoman came back an hour later, receipt in hand and a fifty in change. I owed him more than a beer, that was for sure!  The tax collector was no where to be seen,which made me wonder if he'd ever made it back to my neighbors'.  Probably not.

Oh, do you see why I never like answering the gate?!

The African DMV: “How did we get here?! Here??”

As our friend Julie loves to quite aptly point out, there are moments when we look at her family and ours and say, “How did we get here?!  Here.” Surreal, strange moments have abounded for us Americans as we’ve navigated life in Africa after growing up in a different concept of normalcy.  Crazy moments. Traveling across South Africa with all of our possessions in the trunks of three identical cars.  Screaming and retreating into the house after our mango picking was interrupted by swarms of mating termites gathering in our hair.  Cleaning dead birds out of our kitchen sink while looking for delinquent elephants a remote three hours from the nearest semblance of a village. Watching the aftermath of a housekeeper who convinced Julie’s teenager to drive her to pick up a stolen bathtub when his parents were teaching school.  Just a few weeks ago Julie and I found ourselves in a doctor’s office together, answering each other’s questions regarding frequency of diarrhea before learning that said doctor – who we’ve been going to for over a year- is actually a veterinarian. And then last weekend, baking in a hot car while my four year old, Jonas, Julie, and I banged our heads outside of the African equivalent of a DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) we watched a man carry a perfectly balanced queen-sized mattress down the street on his head.  “How did we get here?!  Here.”

Life is weird. 

On a whim my four year old, Jonas, and I found ourselves at the equivalent of a DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) in the village of Bindura, an hour north of Harare, with our friends, their 16 year old daughter Megan, their gardener, a crowd of thirty, and a shotgun wielding guard. As husband Kurt was living it up in a South African hotel of endless food and actual showers, Jonas and I found ourselves easily entertained by the quirky eccentricities of the drivers-permit testing system and a baseball and glove.  And boy did we wait.

Why we thought the trip would be fast, none of us knows. 

I’ve had some long hellish experiences in the American DMV system, so add a sprinkle of Africa into that and you have a hilarious waiting game involving expired IDs, delayed tests, cramming from the driver’s manual, and some great demonstrations of what not to do while taking a test drive. Though gardener Tapiwa had taken the test twice in our city, bribery (or in his case, a lack of) had gotten in the way.  Now we sat with Tapiwa and Megan in this small town of Bindura, surrounded by anti-bribery signs and rifles. It would have been perfect.  If Tapiwa’s ID hadn’t expired since his last test.  Megan went on to take her test, having studied for weeks from a manual with questions like this:  

 

(c) when reversing

(a) adjust the mirror because obviously it's pointing at the sky

(c) the meaning of life

(c) reversing… because why be cautious at any other time?

(c) no… though if the kid's eleven, all bets are off… I love how all of the true/false yes/no questions always have a weird third option.

Most people –if they can scrape together the money- find themselves repeating the written test over and over until their ability to reason has eventually been tainted enough to find hidden logic in questions like the ones above.  When Megan came out of the testing room, she explained how every student’s test score was announced out loud after the instructor corrected it with the seated class in waiting. But testers never got to see their test again to learn what they had done wrong.  So in the case of Megan, who was just a teeny tiny two questions shy of passing, she could only guess what would have to be changed the next time she lined up for another five hours of DMV fun.

In the end, our car of six people drove away silently, hot, hungry, deflated, and empty handed except for a few pictures of some entertaining signs, and some special rocks Jonas had found in the midst of the driver’s test parking lot.  I couldn't help but once again wonder, “How did we get here?!  Here.”

Tapiwa, Megan, and Jonas cram in the car.

 

Megan and Tapiwa wait at the end of a very long early morning queue. It almost makes things seem organized, doesn't it.

Jonas looks on from the parking lot while the sun heats up.

Cramming during the wait.

A man with a rifle checks IDs before moving applicants around the corner to another queue.

 

I thought it would be funny, but Jonas was not so excited about getting his picture taken in front of this sign.  Good thing Dan was so enthusiastic.

Finding the Rules

As of noon on Friday, Kurt was leaving for a 4:30 flight to South Africa.  We arrived in this country on the second of August with a temporary, 30 day approval to be in the country.  Kurt's visa (applied for in April) is apparently still sitting on someone's desk. The school has been working these past thirty days since our arrival to get us extensions.  In fact, they've had weekly, unfruitful meetings with immigration for months. Jonas and I were granted thirty more days on Thursday, which we found quite humorous considering we were not the two that have employment.  Surely if any of us had to go, it would be Jonas and I booted back across the border for a few days.  At 12:30, after the plane tickets were bought and the hotels booked, Kurt got the news.  The department employee was too busy to deal with Kurt and five other teachers' passports; so they recommended (this from the Dept of Immigration themselves!) that Kurt stay in the country with his illegal unstamped passport, and they would try to get to things the following Monday.  It is Thursday and we are still waiting.  On Monday my illegal husband left on a week long trip with a group of students to the border of Mozambique, paper copy of his passport in hand.

It has become quite clear.  Most of the country's departments are being run with a pair of die.

We were told to expect power cuts upon arriving in the city.  But in America, that means that something has gone wrong, weather or transformer issues, etc, and someone is out there hanging from a power line trying to fix the problem.  In this country, power cuts are a daily way of life.  These cuts occur because the country supposedly has a limited amount of power and different neighborhoods are cut off at different times so electricity can be used elsewhere.  (Of course, certain important homes never lose power.)  Power cuts last anywhere from six to ten hours, and can range anytime from 5 am to 11 pm. In the month we've been here, we have had one day without a power cut.  Generators, inverters and spoiling food are a way of life.  (Funny that we just cram in using more power when we actually do have it!) Citizens are constantly told there is a schedule to outages.  But in the thirty days we have written down the timing of our cuts, not a pattern can be found.  There is a vervet monkey sitting somewhere behind a switchboard waiting for me to put something in the oven so it can erratically flip a switch that cuts our power.

We know of two people here who started the adoption process for their two children five years ago.  For five years while papers have been processing they have bonded with their kids, caring for them and seeing to all of their needs.  But five years later, they are still jumping through hoops trying to clarify what more they must do to officially be the parents of the children they've been raising so they can return to their home country.  Among other things, they have been told that each child will cost them $50,000.  Now desperate, the father has had to return to the home country, visa denied, while the mother has managed a small extension to stay with her two a little longer.  They don't know if this is their last year together before she is deported.  (Apparently we will not be adopting any babies here after all!)

For police officers, who make the equivalent of some housekeepers and gardeners, it is understood: most of their livelihood will come from demanding bribes.  It is not uncommon for people to be pulled over for imaginary traffic violations before being threatened with going to jail if they don't pay.  Police stops are more than common, and usually result in a large pay-off.  On Kurt's trip with his students, his bus was stopped three times within the first three hours of the trip alone.  Just don't let them ask for your passport, Kurt.

I could write another fifty paragraphs of examples.

Power here, is not just in the hands of the person who has money.  It is in the hands of any public official, company, or organization that spins a wheel.  Arbitrary rules are dependent upon the official trying to make them up and enforce them, whether it is the police, airport security, immigration, garbage men, or even the bus driver.  It is hard to learn to navigate in a world of changing rules.  We keep our fingers crossed. And carry extra cash.