A Stop in Tanzania

It was just about a month ago that we arrived to Kamuzu International Airport in Lilongwe, Malawi. Since we are still waiting on our Temporary Employment Permits to pass, we had to ask for a visitor’s visa, which is only good for 30 days. This means our 30 day visa would expired tomorrow, and we’d soon be illegal immigrants worthy of some incredibly massive fines as well as possible deportation. If the Karonga Immigration Office had been open, we would have easily extended our visas last week. But since it wasn’t, we needed to find a way to get our passports stamped.

Singini, one of our friends from our great Coke challenge, told us that he was going up to the Tanzanian border the next morning to buy some sofas. We could ride with him and stop at the immigration office on the border, which is only about 40km from Karonga. This sounded like a good option, considering our only other option would be to pay for a minibus to take us down to Mzuzu, which is about four hours away. The office in Mzuzu closes at Noon on Saturdays, so if we chose that route, we’d have to get up long before the sun rose to ensure that we caught a minibus that would get us down there in time.

We called around and did some research, and everything suggested that we would probably be able to get our visa extension at the border. There were a few things suggesting that we wouldn’t be able to, that the only thing you can do at the border is get an exit stamp to leave Malawi, then enter Tanzania, (which carries a $100US visa cost), then leave Tanzania, simply to get a new entry stamp into Malawi. We were willing to take our chances, since the majority of our sources suggested that this wouldn’t be the case.

We scheduled to meet Singini at the hospital at 7:00AM. The Karonga District Hospital is just on the other side of the Airport from Chaminad, and is about a 30 minute walk from our house. We left around 6:20AM, while the sun was still rising, and arrived at KDH a good ten minutes before seven. However, because of the crowd of people near the entrance, including cargo (bike taxi) drivers who saw money written all over our white skin, we chose to sit about 100 meters down the road. We expected Singini to show up in a car, and since we were the only white people in sight, we figured he’d be able to spot us pretty easily.

Around 7:20, Singini came walking up saying, “Here you are!” He had been looking for us near the entrance, and only found us when he asked someone if they had seen any Muzungus come by. The man quickly pointed, “Oh yeah! They’re sitting right down there.” Singini told us he had to stop in town first, so we followed him toward the main road into town. When we arrived there, he called over four cargo drivers, offering to pay. Okay, we weren’t expecting to ride cargo, but since he was paying, we could go with it.

This was my first cargo experience, and I must say, it’s a lot of fun! The way cargo works is you just sit on the back of the bike. All the bikes here have the little frame that sits over the rear wheel where you can strap packages to the back. Here, though, you can put anything there, including people! They are the Malawian equivalent of taxis in the US. Though I was worried I would loose my balance and cause us to tip over, I found it extremely easy to sit on the back of the bike with someone else peddling. And even though I was just sitting on a frame of metal bars, it was actually quite comfortable. To make things even better, the breeze you get from riding at about 20km/h is absolutely refreshing, especially when you don’t have to do any of the work! Though I’d normally feel extremely strange having someone ride me into town, this is absolutely a typical form of transportation for many Malawians. Our ride cost about 150 Kwacha, which is about $1US: cheaper than a bus ride in Chicago.

When we got to town, Singini informed us he had to drop something off to a friend. His friend is one of the shop owners in the new part of town, and Singini very kindly introduced us to him. He was a very friendly guy, who was genuinely excited to welcome us to Karonga. Then Singini had to go to the bank. He originally planned on just running up to the ATM, but apparently the ATM only lets you take out a couple thousand Kwacha, and so he needed to go inside and wait in line to get all of the money he needed to buy his sofas. He finally came out, and it is then that we found out that we’d be taking a taxi (a car one, like in the US) up to the border. This was our first knowledge of this, and we began wondering if we would have been better off, at least financially, going down to Mzuzu.

We got up to the border pretty quickly, and very comfortably compared to a minibus, even with the mother and her child who were sharing the back seat of a four-door sedan with Singini, Molly, and myself. Singini escorted us directly to the immigration office where he spoke in vernacular a little bit to get things going. Though the morning didn’t go exactly as we expected, we were deeply appreciative of Singini’s help. We eventually got everything taken care of, and with a short stay in Tanzania, we were able to come back into Malawi for another month. Hopefully, at the end of this month, the office in Karonga will be open, and we’ll be able to get our visa extension without all the travel.

Then, for our ride home, the three of us decided to take a mini-bus. This was my first mini-bus experience in Malawi, and it was a pretty great one. It all started with a woman jumping on the bus, sitting in Molly’s lap, and arguing with the driver and the conductor about something. We couldn’t tell what she was arguing about because it was in a different language, but she was definitely upset. From what I could tell, it seemed that she believed she deserved a ride from the driver while the driver and the conductor believed she didn’t. After a few minutes of yelling, all of which occurred with the young woman sitting on Molly’s lap, flailing about, she resigned and got off of the minibus. And though the seat Matt and I were on in the very back of the bus didn’t seem attached, was falling apart, and had clear signs of failed attempts at reconstruction, we made it back to Karonga, safe and sound. Then we just had the hour and a half walk back home. And did I mention that it was just after noon when we got back to Karonga, so our hour and a half walk was during the hottest part of the day. Also, the majority of that walk is down paths of soft sand. (Boy do we take sidewalks for granted in the US.) It’s a good thing I had put on sunscreen that morning; I felt so prepared.

Coming out of this experience, and the great Coca Cola wait, I have discovered that things are definitely not as easy to accomplish here as they are in the US. That is the lesson of my first month in Africa, and I’m sure it’s a lesson I will continue to learn during the rest of my stay.