Friday, September 02, 2005
Accra, Ghana (September 2, 2005)
Thankfully, even here where the headquarters of well funded organizations look transplanted and impenetrable, I can still walk up to the receptionist unannounced and ask for and receive an immediate audience with the coordinator of projects relating to HIV/AIDS. I should not speculate about such a wonderful thing, the thing that enables our trip to progress rapidly and with success. But I am too curious. Are these people never busy? It is the inevitable first thought. Is it because I am white? The inevitable second thought and then a more charitable conjecture: perhaps these people are in fact hardworking and generally free of prejudice, willing to spend time in discussion with me and my friends because they are generous, compassionate or even hopeful about our project. Alternately, they are bored and we are new and different. Thankfully, as I began, our luck continues to hold on this front and we are making headway on all of our Ghanaian features.
On our last day in Ouagadougou, the director of Burkina Faso's Doctors Without Borders project gave us some significant news. The road from eastern Niger around Lake Chad, into Ndjamena is, for our purposes, impassible. For hundreds of kilometers it is hilly with deep sand; even Dr. Lorenzi's typically state of the art, NGO powerhouse, white four by four was repeatedly mired, needing help. (NGOs uniformly hook their nationals up with amazing cars, often granting them checkpoint immunity with special license plates—there is no populace in which this cultivates good will.)
This busted road skews our route and buggers our planning. It means that we cannot avoid driving through Nigeria and it means we are no longer passing through a capital with a Cameroonian embassy. We intended to purchase the Cameroonian visa in the capital of Chad and are now faced with two miserable options: Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, which remains dangerously unstable and Abuja, Nigeria, which many foreigners consider to be an overwhelming and crime-ridden vortex. I was never excited to visit Chad. In fact, I have never wanted to visit Chad in my life, but this complication is creating a nuisance of frenzy and paperwork. In the past three days I have visited the embassies of Togo, Benin, Niger and France, communicating also with the US embassy and the High Commission of Nigeria. The result, when boiled down, amounts to the following: we all have visas to Togo and Benin; we should not go to Abidjan; we should not go to Abuja and none of the francophone embassies will issue Cameroon's visa, though such opportunities sometimes exist. We will have to DHL our passports to an indispensable friend in Washington DC who can process our visas for Cameroon and Nigeria there. (To visit Nigeria you must process your visa application at the Nigerian embassy in your home country—what Tuuli is supposed to do with the absence of such an establishment in Finland, remains to be seen.) Hopefully this will work. Certainly, it means more time waiting in Ghana. Thankfully, we couldn't be in a more agreeable place to wait.
Thankfully, even here where the headquarters of well funded organizations look transplanted and impenetrable, I can still walk up to the receptionist unannounced and ask for and receive an immediate audience with the coordinator of projects relating to HIV/AIDS. I should not speculate about such a wonderful thing, the thing that enables our trip to progress rapidly and with success. But I am too curious. Are these people never busy? It is the inevitable first thought. Is it because I am white? The inevitable second thought and then a more charitable conjecture: perhaps these people are in fact hardworking and generally free of prejudice, willing to spend time in discussion with me and my friends because they are generous, compassionate or even hopeful about our project. Alternately, they are bored and we are new and different. Thankfully, as I began, our luck continues to hold on this front and we are making headway on all of our Ghanaian features.
On our last day in Ouagadougou, the director of Burkina Faso's Doctors Without Borders project gave us some significant news. The road from eastern Niger around Lake Chad, into Ndjamena is, for our purposes, impassible. For hundreds of kilometers it is hilly with deep sand; even Dr. Lorenzi's typically state of the art, NGO powerhouse, white four by four was repeatedly mired, needing help. (NGOs uniformly hook their nationals up with amazing cars, often granting them checkpoint immunity with special license plates—there is no populace in which this cultivates good will.)
This busted road skews our route and buggers our planning. It means that we cannot avoid driving through Nigeria and it means we are no longer passing through a capital with a Cameroonian embassy. We intended to purchase the Cameroonian visa in the capital of Chad and are now faced with two miserable options: Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, which remains dangerously unstable and Abuja, Nigeria, which many foreigners consider to be an overwhelming and crime-ridden vortex. I was never excited to visit Chad. In fact, I have never wanted to visit Chad in my life, but this complication is creating a nuisance of frenzy and paperwork. In the past three days I have visited the embassies of Togo, Benin, Niger and France, communicating also with the US embassy and the High Commission of Nigeria. The result, when boiled down, amounts to the following: we all have visas to Togo and Benin; we should not go to Abidjan; we should not go to Abuja and none of the francophone embassies will issue Cameroon's visa, though such opportunities sometimes exist. We will have to DHL our passports to an indispensable friend in Washington DC who can process our visas for Cameroon and Nigeria there. (To visit Nigeria you must process your visa application at the Nigerian embassy in your home country—what Tuuli is supposed to do with the absence of such an establishment in Finland, remains to be seen.) Hopefully this will work. Certainly, it means more time waiting in Ghana. Thankfully, we couldn't be in a more agreeable place to wait.
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