Fun with International Borders

I am hopelessly behind in processing, let alone sharing, the many unique experiences of this trip to visit my daughter. But rising above some others is our adventure of  going to the "Other Congo," the Democratic Republic of Congo, directly across the river from Brazzaville.  A trip to the DRC sounded so simple. I got through the complicated and expensive process of getting a visa long before I left the States, but that was just the start.

One reason to go seemed obvious--it's right there across the river. Sitting at a river watering hole called Les Rapides, you can see Kinshasa in the haze. Another reason is that just about an hour north of the city is a bonobo reserve where it is possible to see bonobos rescued and protected from the bushmeat hunters. Then there is Woodin and Vlisca, both haute couture fabric houses that do not distribute on this side of the river.

Taking advantage of these possibilities required: a place to stay, a car and personal driver/port expediter on both sides, the aforesaid visas, and U.S. Dollars. And only crisp, never folded dollars in denominations of five and higher. We could not anticipate being able to use credit cards. Stro managed to accomplish all of the above through friends in Kinshasa who offered a house and car and vouched for a driver, Marcel. We figured if our host family hired him to take their children to school and their mothers to nail appointments he would be pretty reliable.

Getting out of Brazza involved getting our names on a hand-written manifest for a boat (based on passport and visa presentations). No commercial boat departs with less than a capacity crowd, so the published schedule is irrelevant. The day we crossed was grey (typical of dry season due to haze). The look of the launch was not exactly reassuring but they did have new life jackets for anyone who wanted one and we were inside (capacity about 40).  The crossing took about 20 minutes.

Then the fun started. I was about to have my second overwhelming cultural experience in a week. There are as many officials on the exit ramp from the dock as passengers. It seemed they all need to check our papers. We are trying to manage our bags while others are hauling in big screen TVs. People (mostly men) are everywhere and it seems they are all yelling and some are in uniforms. It's not great air quality and I have already been sick from same for several days. The first hitch is a guy demanding payment of a port tax, which our star Stro handled.

Then we hit an interesting wall due to the fact that a Congolese friend accompanied us. We were a party of three Americans, one a diplomat, and a professional Congolese woman. The  first objections had to do with how our friend was going to support herself while in DRC, the assumption being a single woman is a burden on someone or a threat of prostitution. She had a visa and a letter of invitation from an ambassador friend who represents another African country in Kinshasa. The port customs officer was not impressed. Our four passports got taken to three places and we were "invited" to wait in the VIP arrivals lounge, an air-conditioned experience we eventually paid five dollars a head for.

At some point in an extensive delay, they made our driver take the Congolese friend's phone to a place where he could print out and copy the letter of invitation. Bureaucrats everywhere need to have records. After two plus hours of waiting we were finally in receipt of our stamped passports and allowed to leave for our visit. Most of this standoff was a proxy fight with the ROC, which recently completed a police action deporting over 130,000 DRC citizens who were in ROC without papers. One small consequence of  this political act is a personalized form of retaliation against ROC citizens who want to visit the DRC. One guy even said, "Actions have consequences."

By contrast and only by contrast, the return trip out of DRC and into Brazza was uneventful. We still had a long wait until the manifest was full (fewer people are traveling back and forth since the deportations, so fewer boats) but this time did not get dunned for sitting in the VIP lounge.Then we made a mistake by paying our porter before he had our bags on the boat. You can see this one coming--he now wanted more money, which we eventually paid (pennies on his original extra demand) and the boat could then depart.

The return boat looked a lot more iffy than the first one. It was a small motorboat launch holding maybe 15 people. There were some life jackets. But the day was unusually sunny, we had life jackets, and the breeze felt great. I was also starting to recover from my malaise, though Stro was declining rapidly. The two of us sat up front in the bow and got giggles remembering other funny boat adventures we have had in strange places.

On the Brazza side, our driver was waiting. We had to fill out entry forms and wait quite awhile for the very manual process of checking and copying every passenger's passport and visa info into a handwritten log and then having other authorities (again, full employment for officials) check them.  After about an hour they let us finish waiting for our passports in the air-conditioned car. By then (having been early at the port in Kinshasa) we were starving and went straight to a great Lebanese lunch on the way home. I had seen yet another example of how my daughter's diplomatic skills, language skills, and big smile help her (and others) through the rough spots in an otherwise fascinating life.