Botswana Interviews...
Link: https://vimeo.com/124772579
Password: vsgmahalapye
Kings Volunteers
Botswana Railways Bike Club
Bike events all over Botswana and the southern part of Africa.
Communist Rally
and
D-Day Celebration
Visa Story
The only English on the document was “Visa Coupon.” The words were printed just above an official looking embossed stamp. Deciphering what was written in the rest of the document was impossible, the words were enormous and full of unfamiliar characters. My passport and the document were sent to me with no further instructions. Two weeks prior, I forwarded my passport to my manager at the Thomson office in Germany and he arranged for the visa that allowed me entry into Russia. I was careful to put both the document and the passport in my carry-on bag when I left for the airport.
At the office in Germany, Rainer shared with me what happened when he went to Moscow for the first time. He arrived without a visa, was detained, and almost deported. Kodak had to arrange a way for him to stay without a visa. It was then that I thought, Well, I’m glad I have my Visa.
I barely slept the night before my flight, the hotel in Frankfurt was noisy and I tried several times to turn down the heat. When the woman at the ticket counter asked me where I was going I responded “Moscow” and she asked to see my visa. I placed the documents and my passport on the counter. She noticed that the dates on my visa papers didn’t match my ticket and said that I may have to change my return flight.
“Is it possible to extend my visa while I am in Moscow?”
“I don’t know, let me check.”
She picked up the phone and after chatting with someone on the other end, she explained, “There was a time when Russia would purposely produce visas with a date that was shorter than the duration of the stay, this was so they could charge you more for a visa extension while you were there. The international travel desk was confident that it would be easy to extend your visa while in Moscow."
After disembarking, I followed the people in front of me as they traveled along the designated walkways that led down to a small corridor in a lower level without any windows. The walls were rough gray concrete and a low ceiling confined the space. The dim fluorescent lights produce faint shadows on the walls. A sign hanging from the ceiling read “Passport Control” and I followed the arrows to my designated line. My papers were tucked into my passport and I handed both to the man in a metal trimmed glass booth. As he flipped through my passport, I asked him how I might extend my visa. He looked at the computer and furrowed his brow. He looked around me at the line of people waiting and back at his computer but didn’t answer my question. Again, he looked around me at the line of people, but still no answer. He picked up my passport and the papers, opened the door to the booth, and walked over to a man sitting behind a raised desk. When he came back he asked me to follow him and walked over to a wooden bench facing the raised desk and told me to sit there and wait.
The man behind the desk lifted his head and looked at me. He said, "The documents you have are, how you say, an invitation to come to Russia.
“Why don’t you have visa?.”
“I thought the papers were my visa.”
I didn’t have cell service in Moscow, but I kept picking up my phone to see who called. I looked up at the man behind the desk and around the dimly lit room as people flowed through the passport control line. It had only been 12 minutes since I sat down, but it felt closer to an hour.
A man in a dark suit walked through a door behind the raised desk and took my papers and my passport then walked over to me and asked, “Is someone meeting you at airport?”
“A man with a Thomson sign that has my name on it.”
The man turned to leave and walked behind the desk. The door slammed shut and the sound echoed through the hall. As the reverberation faded my ears were filled with a deafening silence. My eyes darted around the room before landing on one man sitting on a wooden bench just a couple of feet to my left. The man behind the raised desk sifted through papers. The only lights bright enough to cast a dark shadow were over the pay phones on the far wall next to the metal trimmed glass booths.
I looked up and asked, “Is there a phone I can use?”
The man behind the desk said, “No,” without lifting his gaze.
I looked at the pay phones and contemplated the possible consequences of getting up to make a phone call. It wasn’t like I was handcuffed to the bench and they didn’t ask me not to move. I slowly stood up, looked around the hall, and walked over to the phones. When I put the first receiver to my ear the phone was silent. I slid my credit card into the slot and nothing happened, I turned it over and tried again but still no dial tone. I pressed “0” and nothing. I pressed “0” several times and still nothing. Total silence projected from the receiver and there were no slots to put coins. I tried the same thing on the other phone then walked over to the raised desk and looked up, “Is there a phone that works that I could use?”
Without raising his head, he looked at me through the top of his glasses, “The phone I have no get an outside line.”
“How do I use the pay phone?”
“You need a phone card.”
“How do I get a phone card?”
Silence.
“Is there any way to make a call without a phone card?”
“No,” he replied, his eyes fixed on whatever was on his desk. “The woman who works phones no work on Sunday.”
Visa Story, continued at the bottom of the page...
Egypt
Tibet
The old world farms, homes, and businesses are impeccable buildings made from mud and straw whitewashed and trimmed with bright colors and Tibetan prayer flags. Their natural materials and solid colors complement the environment. In stark contrast, the cities and towns built by the Chinese are constructed in the architectural style of form follows function. They fight with their surroundings and splatter neon blinding their surroundings.
Nepal
Freestyle Competition
Freeheal Competition
Documentary
Tour De France
Misc.
Khama Rhino Sanctuary
Botswana
Visa Story Continued...
The man sitting on the bench next to mine reached out his hand and offered me his phone. I managed a half smile and nodded my head then dialed the number I had for Alla, the Thomson representative in Moscow. The phone rang multiple times before I heard a click and a woman's voice began speaking Russian. It was a recorded message that ended with a dial tone. I wanted to try to call Rainer, but the man with the phone was taken away.
I looked at the man behind the raised desk, "Can I use your mobile phone? I can pay you for the call."
"What's the number?"
He pushes buttons on the phone and then hands it to me. Rainer picked up but couldn’t hear me. I tried two more times but it went straight to voicemail and I couldn't leave a message. After the mobile phone failures, the man in the dark suit came through the door followed by a man carrying a Thomson sign with my name on it. He handed me a phone and Alla was on the other end. She was angry and yelled in my ear, “How could something like this happen?”
“I thought the papers were my visa. I had no instructions on how to get a visa and less than two weeks to get it. Thomson said they would handle all my travel arrangements including my visa.”
“I thought you were an experienced traveler.”
“I’ve never been to Russia and can’t read Russian. My travel was arranged by Thomson. I have applied for several visas and every time it’s different. The only time I had to physically go to a consulate was when I needed to go to Brazil on the same day.”
Less than a month before leaving, I overnighted my passport to my manager at Thomson in Germany and the visa documents, written in Russian, arrived at my house two weeks later without any instructions. I didn’t live in a big city and there are only 4 Russian consulates in the U.S.
Alla continued in a slightly less agitated tone, “All the information was sent to Germany to get your visa.”
The phone went silent. I pulled it from my ear and looked at it.
The driver took the phone from my hand and pushed a button. I asked him if there was any way to extend my visit for a week?”
He didn’t look up from the phone and pushed a few more buttons then handed it back to me.
Alla informed me that the driver made arraignments with the customs office. If I pay $350 American dollars in cash to the driver I can stay for three days without papers.
I asked if I would get a receipt and she said, “No.”
I asked her if Thomson was going to reimburse me and she didn’t know.
I didn’t feel comfortable with any of it. I did know that you can be asked to produce your passport and visa at any time for any reason. If you don’t have them, you can be detained in a Russian jail for 48 hours, fined, and then deported if they can't confirm your identity, or they can ask for a bribe.
I was firm when I said that if they can’t extend my stay and provide me with documentation and a receipt then I can’t accept the offer.
The driver took the phone from my hand. I tried to speak with the man in the dark suit but he ignored me. I don’t have that much cash on me anyway. The driver and the man in the dark suit walked away.
Looking up at the man behind the raised desk I asked, "What was going to happen now?"
“You will be deported.”
He stepped down from his perch and then told me to follow him. It was only then that I noticed how big he was. My eyes were practically level with his belly button. We went through a gate to the other side of passport control where there were similar benches and glass passport control booths. Against the wall in front of me, three men of small stature and dark skin sat uniformly in white plastic chairs. Another man sat on a wooden bench against a wall that had a small sliding glass window and a door next to it. The glass window reminded me of the type of window you’d see in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. A bright light shone through the glass and projected into the room. There is no way I am going to spend the night here.
The large man asked me for my ticket and then walked through the door closing it in front of me.
Through the window, I saw the man talking with a woman behind a computer. He walked back through the door and told me to wait there then turned and walked away.
“What is happening with my ticket?”
The woman sitting behind the computer said, “Flight at 6 tomorrow.”
“Are there any flights tonight?”
“No flights.”
I noticed a small TV screen hanging from the ceiling on my right. It was an old black and white tube TV listing several flights under a heading in Russian with one word I recognized, “Arrivals.” I looked around the room for a “Departures” screen and didn’t see one.
I asked about another airline and pointed to the screen again. I asked about going anywhere, Munich, London, Paris.
I pointed to the Arrivals screen, “Another flight?”
Four women were watching me from behind the sliding glass but no one answered.
I asked, “Is there someone who speaks English?”
“Only a little,” one of them said softly.
I pointed to the screen again, “Different flight, different airline?
“Anywhere? London, Paris, Frankfurt?”
“Lufthansa office closed, not open til tomorrow.”
I showed them some cash, “I will pay to fly tonight.”
One of the women came to the door with a list of flights.
My heart started to race and I took a deep breath, “Thank you!”
I found a flight that left for Frankfurt at 7:59 pm on Aeroflot Airlines. I looked at the clock on the wall, the large hand was on the 6 and the small hand was pointing to 26.
I pointed to the flight and then pointed to me.
One of the women pointed to some payphones on the far wall.
“No phone card.”
The man sitting on the bench stood up and pulled a card out of his pocket. He walked over and held it out in front of me, “You can use this.”
One of the other women said, “She go transportation desk.” And wrote the flight information on a piece of paper, handed it to me, linked her arm inside mine then looked me in the eye.
6:31 pm, the woman walked me down a dark hall that ended at a long flight of stairs. Looking up and cocking my head back I followed the stairs and noticed a door flush with the top stair.
At the top, she used a key card to open the door. I squinted my eyes and pulled back my head as if that would make the light less bright. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. There were people walking in all directions, crisscrossing each other while pulling suitcases and dragging children by the hand. We were in the terminal and I felt like I’d been set free in a foreign land. The woman motioned for me to walk out into the terminal and pointed down a hallway, “Transportation desk.”
I took a deep breath and walked quickly down the hall. I didn’t see a “Transportation Desk.” I walked back the other way, but nothing. I asked a man in uniform, “Transportation desk?” He pointed down the hall in the direction I just come from.
I looked at a clock hanging from the ceiling, 6:36 pm, then walked the other way and saw the same empty brown table and metal chair I saw before. What I didn’t see before was a small white paper sign taped on the wall above the table, written on the paper in large black letters was, “Трансферная стойка” and underneath those letters, in tiny print, “Transfer Desk,” but there was no one there, the chair was pushed in tight against the table, and the door behind it was closed. Next to the table was another door with a proper plastic sign, “Трансферный зал” and “Transfer Lounge” below it. I turned the handle and opened the door a few inches. An elderly man and a young woman sitting in black padded chairs looked up. I asked, “Transportation desk?”
The woman pointed out the door and answered, “There”
“No one is there.”
Silence.
I knocked on the door behind the desk and there was no answer. A few moments later, a woman dressed in a long gray wool coat with a scarf tied loosely around her neck and a small hat on her head aligned at the perfect angle walked through the door. I pointed to the table.
She looked at the table then at me and kept walking.
There was a door down the hall and written on it was, “Служебное помещение.” I walked over and knocked on that door. A young man in a uniform opened it.
“Can someone help me with the transportation desk?”
“No, there is shift change and you wait until person comes to desk.”
Back at the “Transfer Desk,” a woman was sitting behind the table in the metal chair and the people that were in the transfer lounge were in front of the table. I got in line and thought, maybe I should have waited.
6:40 pm. A woman with a big luggage cart thought she can use her cart to push her way in front of me like that was supposed to intimidate me. I looked at her out of the corner of my eye and stepped forward closing the gap between me and the man in front of me. I envisioned pushing these people out of the way and forcing my way to the table. A vision of security officers grabbing my arms and handcuffing me entered my mind. I waited.
6:49 pm, just over an hour before my carriage turned into a pumpkin, I give the woman at the desk the small piece of paper with the flight information and explained to her that I didn’t have a visa and I would have to stay the night at the airport if I couldn’t get on this flight to Frankfurt. She looked at her laptop and then motioned for me to follow her into the “Transfer Lounge.” She waved her hands around while Russian flowed out of her mouth and a woman behind a glass window gestured for me to come over to the window. She asked me for my details while punching the keys on a computer. Another woman stood behind her listening.
6:54 pm.
“Ticket is $400.00. Do you have cash?”
“I don’t have that much cash with me.”
The two women exchanged words in Russian and one of them asked me for my credit card and passport.
“I don’t have my passport, it’s at the passport office downstairs.”
“I go get passport to reservation counter purchase ticket.”
7:08 pm, she came back with no ticket.
“You be at desk to purchase ticket with a credit card.”
I was not allowed to go outside the terminal.
“Can I your bankcard and code?”
I give it to her.
7:15 pm she came back, still no ticket.
“The ATM machine exceeded limit.”
I gave her all of my cash, “Use whatever you need.”
At 7:28 pm she came back with a ticket and several receipts from the ATM.
“What about my suitcase?”
The woman at the computer said, “There isn’t time to send it with you. We put it Lufthansa flight in morning.”
At 7:29 pm, the woman who got my ticket guided me out the door and ran me to the gate where the plane was boarding.
At 7:34 pm, she handed my ticket and my passport to the gate agent and they found me a seat.
7:39 pm, I’m sitting in my seat on the plane and I can’t remember the last time I ate. The menu from the seat pocket reads, “Snack, Chicken breast with Tabouleh salad. The main course, Chicken schnitzel, mashed potatoes, carrots, and green peas, with mushroom sauce or Lamb stewed in pomegranate sauce with couscous and carrots. Dessert Tula gingerbread with fruit filling Butter, olive oil, bun.”
The next few days were like trains, planes, and automobiles. I gained an hour when arriving in Frankfurt landing just before 10 pm, which I thought gave me some kind of an advantage. I took a taxi to the same hotel I stayed at the night before giving me a sense of deja vu. Now it was time to plot how I was going to get my visa and make it back to Moscow in less than fifteen hours. I felt like I was in Gulliver’s Travels and I’d fallen through a crack in time. There had got to be some kind of deeper meaning in all this somewhere. Gulliver had these crazy travel adventures that took him to far-out lands and different worlds where outrageous obstacles got in his way. Tiny people tie him up, a race of giants exploit him for monetary gain, and then he had to fight pirates. It was meant to be a parody of human nature using travel and savage satire. I wondered what the savage satire was in my story.
The closest Russian consulate was in Cologne, 189 kilometers away. There was an express train with one transfer that left at 7:26 am and got me to the Consulate General of the Russian Federation just after 9 am. I bought a ticket online closed my computer, and got ready for bed, but couldn’t sleep. The front desk buzzed my room just as I started to dream. I opened my eyes as the sun’s light began to define the horizon. A man on the phone told me my luggage arrived.
After a quick shower, I grabbed bread, cheese, fruit, and a yogurt from the breakfast room and bolted for the train leaving my suitcase at the front desk. Sitting on the train, I felt the blood pumping through my veins and my eyes pushing from their sockets, I quickly looked from one scene to the next. The train was filled with a lot of businessmen and a few women reading the paper, working on computers, or dozing off with their heads bobbing and swaying to the rhythm of the train. I ate way too fast and a piece of bread got stuck in my esophagus, the pain was excruciating. I drank some water to force it down then realized I could take a breather and actually enjoy my time on the train.
We passed small villages and large towns dotted with a mix of Bavarian style homes, small cottages built from large rock and brick, slick rectangular buildings with exactly the same size windows set equidistant from each other and painted pale yellow or white. The slick rectangular buildings were really ugly apartment buildings built after the war. So many homes were destroyed by the Russians and building ugly apartment buildings was a quick way to give people subsidized housing after everything they owned was destroyed. There is the occasional castle or building designed to look like a castle.
The speaker buzzed and the conductor announced, “Bonn Bad Godesberg.” I took a deep breath, grabbed my backpack, and headed for the closest door. Every muscle in my body tightened and my pulse quickened as I prepared for the trek to the consulate. I walked fast past vine covered walls and immaculate tree lined streets. The houses and buildings were smashed together and pushed up close to the street. I saw a payphone at the end of the block and stopped to call Rainer. He was still angry with me and told me not to bother coming, “I have it handled.”
I reminded him that the same thing happened to him, “I’m at the Consulate and have my plane booked already. I’ll be there in time for the tradeshow.”
Rainer was not my manager and it’s my responsibility to get to the tradeshow. I wonder if someone was angry with him when he didn’t have his visa.
I called Alla and counted the rings, one, two, three, four, five, the tone of the ring brought back the anxiety I felt in the Moscow airport, and every time the phone rang the feeling was amplified. There’s no answer and I can’t leave a message.
I climbed my way up the last hill and the consulate was just around a curve in the road. As I walked around the curve, I saw a crowd of nearly 100 people standing shoulder to shoulder in front of a gate, some of them were holding signs displaying Russian letters stapled or taped to sticks. It was hard to open my lungs enough to get a full breath and they burned as I sucked in air.
The crowd at the gate was pushing and shouting. A long tan metal fence stretched out in each direction from the crowd and guards with guns stood on the other side of the gate next to a small white guardhouse. I looked for a sign to make sure I was at the right place but there were no signs. I pushed my way to the front just right of the gate and an elbow came down hard on my head.
“Does anyone speak English?” I yelled at the guards.
Someone shouted words in Russian and the gate opened to my left. The guards let four people squeeze through then physically held the others back and closed it. I push my way closer to where the gate opened and shout at the guards again, “Does anyone speak English?”
A woman next to me said, “What do you need?”
“I need to get my visa, I have my invitation letter. Do you speak German or Russian?”
“I speak German and Russian.”
She grabbed me by the hand and started yelling at the guard. He opened the gate and we both pushed through the crowd. I wondered if she was using me to get through the gate but at that point, I didn’t care.
We walked quickly to the brown brick building and through a metal door into a room packed with people. The woman spoke Russian to a man at the door and when they were done talking, she told me he would take care of me.
“Thank you so much for your help.”
The man motioned for me to wait by the door next to him. He walked over to speak with a woman sitting behind a small desk and then waved his arm for me to come over and offered me the chair across from her.
“Hello,” she says in a thick Russian accent. “You need visa?”
“Yes.”
“You have invitation?”
I pulled my papers and passport from my pack and hand them to her. She looks them over carefully.
“Your ticket?”
I handed her my ticket.
“Your ticket is not same date as invitation.”
“I know, can I extend the visa?”
She stamps a red label on my invitation.
“Go to desk there.” She pointed to a man standing behind a tall desk in the middle of the room.
“Spasibo.” (Thank you.)
I handed the man my visa invitation. He squinted his eyes, flipped it over, typed on a machine then asked me for my passport. I watch carefully as he put a sticker on one of the pages that covered an entire page. He gave it back to me without looking up and started shuffling papers on his desk. I took this as my clue to walk away.
I opened my passport and on the top of the sticker were fat red letters виза next to the word visa in white encapsulated by a green box with squiggly lines. There was also a hologram with an image of the Kremlin clock tower and what looked like a capital building. I inspected it before letting the air out of my lungs and feeling a bit tired. She didn’t extend my visa and I only have 25 minutes to get to the train station. I shoved my tired feeling down in my gut and swallowed. Once I was outside the gate I pushed past the people and ran down the hill.
I spent three days demoing motion picture film restoration software and trying to pause at just the right time for the translators. On the last day, Rainer told me we successfully sold a complete system to a Russian film company that brought over one million US dollars to the trade show floor locked in a steel briefcase. Earlier, I had seen a man carrying a silver metal briefcase surrounded by three large men.
On my last night, I put on a little black dress and went to the hotel bar to celebrate before going to the Bolshoi Theatre and watching Russia’s oldest ballet. The men I worked with were more interested in drinking Russian Vodka.
I witnessed a rush on the Bolshoi entry doors similar to a general admission rock concert, except most people were dressed in formal attire. Security needed to force the doors closed between surges.
During my trip, I was also able to meet up with a colleague’s old college friend who gave me a tour of the city. He met me with a dozen red roses and, after the tour, welcomed me into the tiny two room apartment he shared with his wife. There was a yellowed plastic corrugated wall that slid from the right to close off the tiny kitchen. The bathroom was similar to one on a small sailboat or travel trailer. A showerhead was connected to the exposed plumbing above the toilet and a curtain rod hung from the ceiling in a half circle around the toilet. You could use the toilet and take a shower at the same time saving on toilet paper. He showed me the bedroom where he shared a twin bed with his wife. The tiny sagging bed was pushed against the wall in the corner under one long shelf that was the length of the bed and stacked high with old hardcover books. There was barely enough room to open the drawers of the dresser on the other side of the room. I think he said, “We shared the apartment with our son and we all sleep in the same room.”
My mind wasn’t sure I comprehend that correctly and I felt embarrassed for him so I didn’t ask for more details. He was humble about everything he had achieved.
We sat down on the couch and his wife served some traditional Russian desserts and candy. He was a Nobel Peace Prize winner living in what would be considered the slums in the U.S. Being half Jewish, he felt he was lucky to have a position at the University of Moscow that included housing. He seemed to accept his position with pride.
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