The "VISA TERROR"!!!!

Two vastly different sets of words come to mind when attempting to communicate my initial experience with my new home, South Africa.

The first set could easily include any of the following: Disastrous. Pathetic. Frightening. Hyperventilation. Maybe looking back it was not as bad as it seemed, but at the time, I sure felt each of these emotions to a strong degree. To start off, even before Cape Town contact, my flights were a mess. For some reason, my travel agent thought it a good idea to leave me 40 minutes to navigate the Detroit airport all the way to my plane taking off to Amsterdam, and then 50 minutes to confusedly scamper around the Amsterdam airport to find my flight to Cape Town. In short: not cool. Any delays in my flights whatsoever could prove tragic to my fragile schedule. And of course, there were delays. Why not, right? First, on the way in to Detroit, there was too much rain and fog to land, leaving to pilot to announce a 30 minute pause in our landing while we circled above our destination. Luckily, I made that flight with a little help along the way, but only to encounter another obstacle. Apparently, there is a machine underneath each plane that tows it backwards so that it can make a straight shoot off on the runway…but not on our plane! Our machine was “unexpectedly malfunctioning”, and wouldn’t pull the plane backwards. Another 40 minutes passed by, the machine was replaced, and we were on our way. All would have been simple if Amsterdam didn’t have a seemingly hundred-something mile runway that we had to taxi down for a good twenty minutes to get from where we landed to the actual airport. After exiting the plane, I barely had a chance to catch my breath before dropping to a dead run, searching fruitlessly for an airport employee, a board with flight postings…anything that would save me from being swallowed up by this completely foreign airport that appeared to be trying to make my life that much harder. With some help from a British man on his way to Ethiopia and a candy shop girl, I was racing off to my gate that was as far away from where I was as possible, politely yet hurriedly shuffling past happy couples on the people movers, trying not to bowl anyone over in my race to the finish. I pulled up, sticky with sweat and panting, feeling hives about to break out and cover my face, only to be greeted by a smiley Dutch woman’s face, saying, “Just in time, eh?” While trying to recover my composure, I add insult to injury by realizing that there is an entire team of VERY cute foreign soccer players (later found out to be ITALIAN!) staring at me in a warm, harmlessly entertained manner. Perhaps it was my sweaty forehead, my tearing off of the three layers confining me in a makeshift oven, or my continuous, frenzied fanning of my itching face that caught their eye…

At any rate, all of that was somewhat anticipated, and really didn’t turn out as bad as it could have. I made all my flights, made some interesting chatting partners, watched several movies, and ate some of the worst food I’ve ever had. But it is what follows that created the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

Touching down into Cape Town was a beautiful descent, despite the fact that it was pitch black out. I had wanted to see the whole landscape of South Africa lain out before me in the sunset, but instead was pleasantly surprised by the twinkling lights that illuminated the city of my new home. The amount of lights I could see surprised me, yet the big patches of black abyss did not; I assumed those to be the townships, whose residents are not lucky enough to have electricity or running water, among many other luxuries we take for granted daily. Once arriving in the modest yet increasingly modern looking airport, I proceeded to the immigration center. These are where they look over your passport, ask you your intentions on being in South Africa, may hassle you with some particulars like an address to where you are staying or detailed bits of your itinerary, but nothing unmanageable. Therefore, I was not expecting any kind of issues in the slightest. Boy was I gravely mistaken. I watched everyone else go up to the window, hand their passport over, and leave on their merry way within a matter of 2 minutes. Assuming mine to be the same, I handed over my passport to a sweet looking African 20-something woman with a nice, friendly face. “Return ticket please,” she asks for verification purposes. All is going well until she tries to scan my visa inside my passport. I see her try several times, but not get results. She moves to plan B: squinting to closely examine the letter series above the barcode to type it in. “I can’t read it…” she mumbles, barely audible under her breath. She plucks a few attempts into the computer⎯nothing. “Umm…I don know wat to do…I can’t read it…the letters…and it won’t scan.” My smile faded long ago with the initial “umm”, replaced by a furrowed brow. “You can’t read it,” I ask in somewhat disbelief, “and it won’t scan?” “No I can’t, you see if maybe you can tell me what the letters are”. I fumble out loud through the first couple, and strain my eyes with all their might, but the last two letters are simple illegible. All the while, my panic level is skyrocketing. She goes on to explain to me that she cannot scan the barcode, nor read the letters, and therefore doesn’t know how she is going to get me into the country. She inquires about a little white sticker that should have come on the passport that had a barcode and the visa number on it, saying that is the usual way they get people through. I vaguely remember tearing the two stickers off upon receiving the visa, considering them severely unimportant due to the lack of warnings saying “DO NOT REMOVE STICKERS”, aside from my mom cautiously advising me to maybe keep them on⎯something I severely regret not heeding in the now, but I dared not tell the lady I took them off, for whatever reason.

Terror beginning to creep up on me, I frantically ask her if there is someone I can call, anything I can do to fix this. “It’s not really what you can do, so much as me…I need to ask becos I do not know how I can do this really”. After she confers with several of her colleagues in their native Xhosa tongue, the clicking language that would have on any other occasion caught my full and complete attention in fascination (a language I hope to learn in my stay here), she asks me if I have documents from University of Cape Town stating my acceptance. Knowing full and well that I had left the copies with my mom and failed to take some of them with me, not thinking I’d need them, I started ever so slowing tearing up. I had no idea how I was going to get out of this one. Visa business is not joking matter, and most countries have impenetrable rules and regulations regarding this kind of thing. I scrambled through my neatly organized folders of paperwork, and tried to give her a few sheets that while I knew they were not what she was looking for, thought maybe something would work. She reviewed them, and then pointed me to a bench to sit at while she went to ask her supervisor for clearance. At this point, I was nearing hysterics. I had no phone, no one to help me, no resources…I felt the most futile and frustrated I’d been in a long time. I sat, trying to calm myself with breathing, which only further pushed me into hyperventilation. Gasping to catch my breath with tears streaming down my face as the airport cleared out, I knew this wasn’t the way these things should be handled. One should remain calm and collected, and figure the rational way out. But my thought process was so far from that, and I didn’t think it would be coming back to its senses any time soon given my state.

After about 45 minutes in total spent at that window, I retreated to the benches. While I sat trying only to regulate my breathing so I didn’t pass out or choke, a short, airport uniformed African man with a jovial presence approached me. “Aww miss why you cryin?...’is ok…shh” he asked me with the most genuine concern I’d felt the entire trip. Through spurts of breath I told him what happened (or tried to). “Aww, so you a-lec-see? Don’t you worry miss. You got to calm down. Shh…I will take care of it” He explained to me that he was the supervisor, and that he was able to figure out some sort of way to process my visa (I was unable to understand exactly how in the midst of my choked-back sobs I was trying so hard to repress) and that everything would be fine. “See now, are you happy to be in South Africa?” Feeling safe and shielded by this man’s perplexing care for my predicament, he was able to talk me down from my hyperventilated state. “You know, you got to stop cryin and calm down, cos over at customs, they just send ya back to other way if they see you sad like that,” he persuaded tenderly, “and usually, we have very strict policy and we not let people in. But for you, ‘is ok”. He asked me what I was going to study here, where I would attend university, and explained with bursting pride to me that he just received his bachelors degree with honors from University of Western Cape. “Why you not go there instead of UCT?” he half joked, but slightly seriously demanded to know, with a tinge of school rivalry afloat in his voice. As he walked me back to the window, all the people (4 in total) who had been a part of this fiasco process gathered around the window seemingly to debrief with me and ensure that I was alright. “Did I scare you? I really didant mean ta…I was tryin to be so nice and helpful…did I really scare you miss?” the lady I initially worked with kept inquiring with the deepest concern that she had somehow offended me. I assured her it was not her in the slightest who scared me, but the situation. “now, you gon have to look me up when you get to school miss” my uniformed guardian angel stated with certainty. I agreed, knowing with sincere regret and sadness that I would probably never see this man again. “I gon hafta take you out…not tonight….but soon…” he trailed off, as though he didn’t really intend for me to hear, but hoped I did. I smiled, and thanked all of them for their immense gratitude and services several times over, and the supervisor walked me over to the other side of the gate, and bid me farewell with a charming smile and kindest eyes imaginable.

This leads me to close with my second set of words (and phrases!) to describe my first contact with the so-called “Rainbow Nation”: Genuine. Caring. Warmhearted. Helpful almost to a fault. Extremely proud of their culture and nation, and foreigners’ interests in exploring it. And above all, welcoming with open arms.

Despite the fact that I went on from what I shall now call “the visa terror” only to be greeted (or in this case, NOT greeted) by my suitcases (meaning they were delayed and still god knows where but apparently “on their way”), closed currency conversion stations, and the news that my driver was 2 minutes away from leaving and considering my name a mistake on his lists, I think I will come to associate more widely my second list of words with coloring my first experiences here; to painting a picture of the South Africa I eagerly awaited through years of study, reading, and research, and to the South Africa that I hope to solidify more concretely in these coming months that does not pale in comparison to the high standards I have barricaded around it.