Yesterday was interesting. I woke up around 3:00am and couldn’t get back to sleep no matter what I tried. I’ve been stressed out recently because my Ethiopian visa was supposed to be extendable, but now I’m finding that it is “not valid for extension”. More about that issue later.
At 4:00 I gave up trying to fall back asleep and decided to go for a run to clear my head. I turned on my audiobook, The Count of Monte Cristo, and took off. (With my troubles falling asleep, I’ve found that some music or an audiobook is helpful, and I’ve been enjoying this Dumas classic). It felt like I was in a new city being out this early in the morning. A bunch of dog “gangs”, or packs, were wandering the streets together and it was a bit intimidating. Sometimes one gang would run up on another and chase them off or, if feeling brave, the affronted pack would stand their ground and a little fight would break out. I found that I was able to run much better in this morning environment compared to the hot and muggy conditions I had been running in after work.
Now for my visa issue. When I got my Ethiopian visa I was only able to get a 30 day one. Although the website where you get evisas advertised 90 day visas, they recently shut down the option. (I think with recent regime change there has been a crackdown on immigration, because my coworker told me that within the past year they have also quite the practices of “on-arrival visas” and allowing neighboring country’s citizens to enter without a visa). Anyways, I took the 30 day visa and expected I would be able to extend it. Online it said I would be able to add up to 30 days at a time to my visa through the online visa website, and I was dumb enough to trust this. A few days ago I went to renew/extend my visa and got an error message. There is a rule that says my visa has to be within 15 days of expiration to be eligible for extension, so I thought maybe the dates were a bit wonky. I tried again the next day—same thing. I knew my visa was within the extension window at that point, so I got nervous. I talked with one of my friends here and he told me all about the immigration issues and that there might have been changes recently, concluding my best bet was to visit the Immigration Office.
Thankfully, there’s an official Immigration Office in Hawassa and that brings us to yesterday morning. After my run—and it was a good thing I was up early—I went to the immigration office. It was a 30 minute walk there and the path took me through some new parts of the city. One thing I can’t get over is the number of abandoned buildings and the number of new construction projects. It’s very confusing to me because sometimes these entities are right next to one another and I wonder if one failed, what’s going to make the next one successful. Anyways, I got to the immigration office to find at least 200 other people already waiting. The office said they opened at 8:00 online, I showed up at 7:50, but these people already had ticket numbers and were inside the facility. I usually don’t enjoy being white and sticking out, but in this case it helped me and I was promptly escorted to speak with someone.
The conversation I had left me in more of a dilemma than I was before. The only answer they gave me was this: They don’t do visa extensions. At first I was confused because, well, what’s an immigration office for? And then I asked if the main office in Addis Ababa could help me—this is where the language barrier and the implicit versus explicit meanings became difficult—they never said that the office there did extensions, but they never said it didn’t. I walked away under the impression that they didn’t know but that Addis Ababa would have definitive answers for me, and I have a theory now. My theory is that some policy change has recently taken place and because implementation, dissemination, and infrastructure change can take pretty long, nobody really knows the state of things or which is the correct thing to do. Unfortunately this leaves me in a bit of a limbo, but I spent yesterday and last night stressed out, thinking about my options and have now come to a decision.
Rather than taking a few days to go to Addis to have my visa extended or refused extension, I’m just going to enjoy the next 11 days I have in Hawassa and then leave when my visa expires on the 13th to Shinyanga. I’m bummed because this will cut my adventure short by a month, but with the rise in flight costs my budget was getting very tight, so this might be a good thing in the end. Another thing is that I will also feel more comfortable and happy being back in a country where they speak English and I know a bit of the language.
So, just as a tentative update, this means I would be arriving home mid-August. I haven’t finalized anything yet and I’m not sure how this will work out, but I’m excited at the prospect of getting back to Tanzania and back home sooner than planned. I am really enjoying the work I’ve been doing recently and the work I plan to do seems like I will be learning a lot of skills, so my hope is to find a way to continue this internship for a month or two when I get home, I’ll just have to see what that could look like.
As you can imagine, following the meeting with the immigration office I was overwhelmed. I think I’m someone more prone to an anxious disposition and stress, so internally all the dials were turning and I was beginning to feel very flustered. I just wanted to solve the issue, but in reality there was nothing I could do until I talked with the teams here in Ethiopia and in Shinyanga. Nevertheless, my mind was racing and I knew I needed to slow down a bit. I don’t know how it happened, but I stumbled upon one of the only bookstores I have seen through both Tanzania and Ethiopia. It was a perfectly timed meeting. Books are something that really help me to slow down and get out of my head, so it was wonderful have a whole library at my fingertips to just rifle through. In the end I walked aways with Crime and Punishment and a better sense of my next steps with the issue.
As much as I wanted to get right to solving the issue at hand, I had some meetings at work and some tasks I needed to finish. Alas my compartmentalization skills haven’t yet fully developed and my day was fairly unproductive, but it was good to at least feel distracted. The monkey visitors were back and more bold than ever. Despite my best efforts to scare them off (softly saying “shoo”) they remained.
Right as I was packing up to go home a large storm rolled overhead. It wasn’t a gentle rain either and I decided to play it safe and stay at work a little longer. Eventually I started to get hungry—my dinner routine is great, I’ve become efficient and quick with getting home and making dinner, but it means if I’m just 15 minutes behind schedule my stomach lets me know. After a while the rain had slowed to a gentle patter and I decided to risk it.
I got home, made my dinner, did a little bit more worrying about my situation and then went to bed. I knew that I wasn’t going to solve anything, so I put it off to today and decided to get some good sleep. Last night, thankfully, was my first full night of deep, sound sleep undisturbed by mosquitoes, light pollution, or loud noises. In spite of my stressful day I slept really well. Today I’m going to spend a lot of time trying to solve this issue of my visa—it’s a holiday so that will be helpful!