Cutting it Close
We’ve been getting the usual amount of warnings against African travel. My cousin recounted the story of her friend who got an alphabet of hepatitis infections plus malaria in a Ghanaian hospital. Dave’s coworker, Tom, at Digidesign, warned him of the dangers of sectarian violence; and the next day a bullet was fired from the parking garage through Tom’s 3rd floor office window in Daly City and lodged in the ceiling.
It is not nearly so unsettling to go to poor countries now as it was many years ago. The first time I went to India was really the first time I had ever encountered free-range poor people. In California, before Reagan closed the asylums and started an international trend, they were kept out of the way. But now there are so many. While steeling myself for the shock of the beggars of Mali, I forgot to avert my eyes from the sight of two French citizens sitting in piles of blankets on the sidewalk, eating scraps (but presumably French scraps) from a cardboard tray while the snow drifted down upon their caps and possessions. They didn’t even have tents, unlike the encampment a couple of blocks down Avenue de Wagram where about four guys in four identical army surplus tents were sheltered near the Internet cafe talking to a policeman. Team Homeless. I wonder if the cop was offering them a bed or offering to dump their belongings in the river? I wonder if they read Les Miserables in West African schools?
We cut it just a little close in obtaining visas for the four countries in Africa we are visiting. Don’t you do that when you travel. Allow three weeks for each country you have to mail off to Washington for permission to visit, and schedule the last one to come back at least two weeks before your departure. I didn’t do that. We had tickets to leave on 26 February, and the Burkina Faso embassy told me they’d mailed our visas back to us Express Mail on 21 February, on 22 February the USPS website informed us that our visas had been Misrouted and they were Working to Correct the Error.
That caused me a bit of excitement. Had we wasted a Lariam because now we weren’t going to be able to go at all? I spent a day researching the really expensive alternatives to getting a passport in four days (for more than $300 paid to a couple of different agencies you can almost do this) and what our travel insurance covers and so forth; to see what might be salvaged from the trip.
The next day our passports were found and the postman failed to encounter me at my home so I went and retrieved them at the Redwood City Main Post Office.
The lady at the post office sat there with their internal tracking record in hand, showing that our package had been in Gaithersburg Maryland at 3 AM on 22 February before it went missing; and a postmark on the package showing it was mailed on 22 February. She wouldn’t refund the Express Mail fee for having missed their guaranteed delivery time. This is rubbish. The Burkina Faso embassy was not open at 1 o’clock in the morning on 22 February to hand them over a package to lose.
The passport emergency replacement agents all insist that you use Federal Express. You do this too: no USPS Express Mail ever!