Trapped in Kenya, temporarily

As always seem to be the case anymore, I'm going to have to try and get caught up on the travel blog. I've left Africa and have returned, albeit to far northwestern Africa in Morocco (more on that later). My time in sub-Saharan Africa was very positive, although with it's usual Scudder-related disasters. I ended up being trapped in Kenya for a few days. I popped in to the Nairobi airport for my flight to Cape Town on South African Airways and was denied entrance to the flight because my temporary passport (the one left over from the Great Unpleasantness in Cairo) didn't have enough blank pages so the airline wouldn't let me on. Maybe the most amazing thing about the encounter was that I didn't end up in a Kenyan prison - essentially, I could have handled it much better than I did. I think I was mainly angry because it brought back the whole passport theft in Cairo - it's like the gift that just kept on giving. Anyway, I had to leave the airport, make it back to Kenyatta University, and arrange to make it to the US Embassy the next day to get another temporary passport. The lady who denied me access to the South African flight told me that it really wasn't that big of a deal and that the embassy would just put extra pages in my passport - I tried to explain to her that while I'm unfamiliar with diplomatic statecraft I was pretty certain that they wouldn't, in fact, add extra pages to a temporary passpost - that sort of defeats the point of a temporary passport.

Now, getting a new passport caused a bit of a planning problem. I could have made arrangements to just get on the next flight for the same time the next afternoon, but that presupposed that I'd be able to get my new passport at the embassy in around two hours and still make it to the airport on time. It would have been impossible to leave the embassy, make it all the way back to Kenyatta to pick up my suitcases, and then make it to the airport. So, the only option would have been to leave all my worldly possessions with a driver that I had met the day before and depend upon him to wait for several hours outside the embassy for me. It all seemed a bit iffy so I just postponed my flight until the weekend, which caused me to miss my time in Cape Town (which really annoyed me because that was the part I was looking forward to most of all). Now, typically, after having done that, the whole thing worked perfectly. Traffic in Nairobi is incredibly bad so I had arranged for the driver to come out to Kenyatta around 6:00 in the morning (this is the same driver that I had just met the day before at the airport) so I could get to the airport hopefully by 8:00 (they have reduced hours if you're an American citizen, although many hours if you want to become an American citizen, which is interesting in and of itself - anyway, there were only a couple hours in the morning and then a couple hours later in the afternoon, so if the passport wasn't done in the morning the afternoon time slot would have made catching the afternoon flight a moot point anyway). Well, the driver actually arrived early and then took off on this insane drive through every shortcut known or unknown to man, and we actually made it to the embassy early, which gave me time to go next door to have my passport photo taken before preceeding into the embassy.

As it turned out I was the first American citizen in the embassy and they took care of me very quickly. Well, not very quickly, of course. The big snafu was that I had to fit out the form to get a new passport and the woman gave me a red pen, which I thought was odd, but figured that maybe it was a new policy. So, I filled out the entire form and gave it back to her, only to be met by this quizzical look and the obvious question - why did I fill it out in red? I explained that she had actually given me the red pen, which then made her feel pretty foolish. I didn't say much, although I did suggest that maybe it would be a good plan to throw all the red pens away. So, I had to fill out the form again, and then left it with her. She told me to come back around 11:00, which was actually after the official citizen time slot had ended at 10:00. She said not to worry and to just tell the guards at the gate to call her and tell her I was there and that they would let me back at the unofficial hour. It seemed unlikely, but I didn't have much of a choice. As I was filling out the form it occured to me that the US Embassy in Nairobi was actually very nice, and then it dawned on me why it looked so new - it is new, the old one was blown up a couple years ago. Oh, and it was September 11th, which made the whole thing just a bit more odd.

Anyway, I went next door to a very nice coffee shop and had a couple very good cafe lattes and some cheese cake and just sent emails back and forth on my Blackberry. It was one of those experiences that you can't quite convince yourself is actually happening because it was just a little too surreal. At 11:00 I walked back to the embassy, told the gates to call the woman, and, sure enough, they let me in and my new temporary passport was waiting for me. Utterly painless and quick. So, then I had to go find my driver. Sure enough, he had waited for me outside the entire time. So, theoretically anyway, I could have actually done all of that, made my second afternoon flight time, and included my trip to Cape Town. Of course, the skeptic would say that if I had actually left all my worldly possessions with the taxi driver that there would have been a smaller chance that he would have still been waiting for me outside. However, I think he would have because he was a great guy.

One last weird thing about an utterly weird day. When I walked out of the embassy to find my driver I couldn't track him down right away. So, I checked my Blackberry to see if he had called me - we had swapped phone numbers before I entered the diplomatic maze and entered his phone number into my phone. Sure enough, the phone showed that I had missed a call from him. I called back the number and some woman answered who had never heard of my driver - nor had she the second time I called. Anyway, I found my driver and told him the story. He said that I had entered the wrong number into my Blackberry in the first place. He failed to grasp my point that it completely defied logic that I would get a phone call out of the blue from a person I didn't know who had the same number that I had allegedly entered incorrectly.

Anyway, I made it back to Kenyatta and was able to use the extra days to build on the momentum of several good meetings so it turned out OK in the end.